Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities. While political and social structures are a jumping-off point for her work, Barnette’s use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical also summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. Focusing on her work in the exhibition, My Father’s FBI File: Government Employees Installation, Barnette discusses the emergence of her FBI series and how it has since progressed in her practice.

Born in Berkeley and continuing to live and work in Oakland, David Huffman works in painting and installation, using these media to explore pop-culture iconography and metaphoric stories of conflict, enlightenment, fear, and resolution across multiple bodies of work. In this program, Huffman talks about Hunter Gatherer, a large-scale mixed media piece that expands on ideas explored throughout his Traumanauts series, in which he engages sci-fi aesthetics and objects related to Black culture to consider identity and racial politics and propose alternative futures.

Each artist speaks informally about their own work on view in the galleries and touches on the thematic section of the exhibition in which their work is included.