October 7, 2017 - 10:58
This picture shows Sadie Barnette as a toddler in her father’s arm, a typical image of a father cradling a child. This artwork has the approximate dimension of 24” x 18” positioned vertically. Despite the moderately large frame, the portrait of the father and daughter only takes up one around 6” x 3” in the middle of the entire picture. Sadie Barnette and her father’s portrait is cut from a photograph and cropped from his father’s head to his thigh. In this photograph, her father’s eyes gaze down upon his beloved daughter, and his lips slightly curl into a gentle smile. His skin is chocolate in color, and his hair is of dark brown color and trimmed into a fairly short length. Below his forehead, his lush eyebrows curl as he shifts his gaze down on his baby, and his short facial hair covers the lower part of his chin. He wears a black round-collared t-shirt, with an orange star about the length of his shirt’s collar, surrounded by white text arranged in circle. He also wears a pair of faded blue jeans. Sadie Barnette, as a toddler, sits on his father’s right arm which is on your left. She wears white clothing for the entire body. The top of Sadie’s head, which is positioned around his father’s shoulder, was decorated with a few rhinestones. Blue and pink crown-shaped ones are placed to the left and above her head as if she is wearing them. Below the blue crown sits the purple heart and rectangular rhinestone, and a purple star-shaped one is placed above the pink crown. This small father and daughter photograph sits in the lower left corner of a holographic paper, which takes up one third of the entire frame, in the middle but slightly shifted downward. This iridescent paper is silver in color and appears to be flat. By looking from different angle, the paper reveals its multicolored reflection as if the red, green, and blue light paints itself on the paper. For the outermost layer, the silver glitter paper surrounds the rest of the portrait. Unlike the inner background, this paper glimmers as if countless grains of silver sand covers its surface. Just by looking, the outer background looks rough to the touch, and bears a texture similar to that of a sandpaper, only more shimmering and embellished.
Sadie Barnette’s Dear 1968 exhibition incorporates family photos and pages from a thick FBI file on her father, once a member of the Black Panther Party in 1968. At that time, racial tensions were high, and the FBI carried out investigations on Black Panther Party members, tracking everything about them no matter the triviality, including members’ activities, income, and expenses. To illustrate how Barnette viewed her father versus how others, especially the government, viewed him, Untitled (Baby Girl) creates a window of different perspectives for the viewers to look through. Two glittery backgrounds, same in luster but different in texture, provide contrasting viewpoints of Barnette’s father. Smooth in texture, the holographic background gives a warm, family-man impression of the father, as he is tightly framed in this background and is clearly the focus. Stepping back, the rougher, silver glittered background makes the father look tiny and implies a rougher opinion of the father from the public’s viewpoint. All together, the uniform, glittering backgrounds, lacking shading and depth, remove the sense of time and space, illustrating the dystopian, fantastical world that America was in 1968.