Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon

Installation view of Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, The Kitchen, New York, January 18, 2022–March 6, 2022. Photo: Adam Reich

The Studio Museum in Harlem, in collaboration with The Kitchen, presents Sadie Barnette’s The New Eagle Creek Saloon, the first East Coast institutional presentation of the artist’s installation reimagining the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Established by the artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton, CA, chapter of the Black Panther Party, The New Eagle Creek Saloon (operated by Barnette between 1990–1993) offered a safe space for the multiracial queer community who were marginalized in other social spaces throughout the city.

A study published in 2019 by professor of sociology Greggor Mattson cites a continued decline of LGBTQ+ bars across the United States between 2007 and 2019, with a disparate impact on those serving female-identified people and people of color. Presented for the first time in New York City on the heels of the 50th anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising, The New Eagle Creek Saloon celebrates the history of queer Black space and resurrects its presence in a location in the city (Chelsea) where this legacy has been so instrumental to avant-garde art and performance.

Within and in response to Barnette’s installation, The Kitchen launches its first-ever nightlife and club culture residency, from madison moore, cultural critic, DJ, Assistant Professor in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, and author of Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (Yale University Press, 2018).

These artists’ visions come into lyrical and urgent intersection across the duration of the exhibition and residency period, with DJ sets from nightlife practitioners scheduled across four Saturday Sessions kicking off on January 22 with Shaun J. Wright, with more to be announced as part of madison moore's Nightlife-in-Residence. In the periods where Barnette’s installation is not programmed, recordings from previous presentations will be played into the room. These sonic activations gesture toward the ongoing endurance of queer histories and hold space for the somatic archives of disappeared or lost queer space over time.

History similarly echoes across a zine created by Barnette which will be made available to visitors for takeaway, filled with newspaper clippings, ephemera, and photographs.

More info on madison moore: Nightlife-in-Residence can be found here.

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon and madison moore: Nightlife-in-Residence are organized by Legacy Russell, Executive Director & Chief Curator, The Kitchen.

Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon is made possible with generous support from Bernard I. Lumpkin & Carmine D. Boccuzzi, Agnes Gund, and Olivier Berggruen & Desiree Welsing; annual grants from Open Society Foundations, Lambent Foundation Fund of Tides Foundation, and Keith Haring Foundation; and in part by public funds from New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Sadie Barnette’s multimedia practice illuminates her own family history as it mirrors a collective history of repression and resistance in the United States. The last born of the last born, and hence the youngest of her generation, Barnette holds a long and deep fascination with the personal and political value of kin. Barnette’s adept materialization of the archive rises above a static reverence for the past; by inserting herself into the retelling, she offers a history that is alive. Her drawings, photographs, and installations collapse time and expand possibilities. Political and social structures are a jumping off point for the work, but they are not the final destination. Her use of abstraction, glitter, and the fantastical summons another dimension of human experience and imagination. She has been awarded grants and residencies by The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artadia, Art Matters, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Carmago Foundation in France. She has enjoyed solo shows in the following public institutions: ICA Los Angeles, The Lab and the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; MCA San Diego, CA; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; the Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis; and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and Pitzer College Art Galleries, CA. Her work is in the permanent collections of: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Brooklyn Museum, NY; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Guggenheim Museum, NY; JP Morgan Chase Collection; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California, CA; the Berkeley Art Museum, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and the Walker Art Center, MN; as well as a permanent, site-specific commission at the Los Angeles International Airport forthcoming in 2024. She is the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley's Black Studies Collaboratory. She is represented by Jessica Silverman, where her first solo exhibition Inheritance is on view November 20, 2021–January 8, 2022. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.

madison moore, Ph.D. (American Studies, Yale), is an artist-scholar, DJ and assistant professor of Queer Studies in the Department of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia. They are broadly invested in the aesthetic, sonic and spatial strategies queer and trans people of color use to both survive and thrive in the face of rolling catastrophe. His first book Fabulous: The Rise of the Beautiful Eccentric (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018), offers a cultural analysis of fabulousness as a practice of resistance. Other articles have been published in venues including The Atlantic, Theater, and the Journal of Popular Music Studies. madison has performed internationally at a range of nightclubs, parties and art institutions, including the Perth Festival, Performance Space Sydney, the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, American Realness, Tate Britain, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. madison is currently writing a book titled Dance Mania: A Manifesto for Queer Nightlife. In Summer 2022, madison will be an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute.

EXPLORE THE EAGLE CREEK SALOON ZINE