Sadie Barnette was born and raised in Oakland, California and holds a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from UC San Diego. She has presented solo exhibitions at venues such as The Kitchen in New York City, ICA Los Angeles, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, MCA San Diego, The San José Museum of Art, and The Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco. Her work is in permanent collections including Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim, LACMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oakland Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, The Walker, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Barnette is the recipient of grants and residencies including the Studio Museum in Harlem AIR, Artadia, Art Matters, Fleishhacker Foundation’s Eureka Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Headlands Center for the Arts, United States Artists Fellowship, and was an Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory.

Sadie Barnette is an artist working with a wide variety of visual outputs, often all at once. She uses drawing, photography, installation and text to create a modular structure for marking time, attending to archives and family histories, and processing sensory information. Her different material strategies are often in tension with one another — minimalism and density, draftsmanship alongside digital tools, everyday objects vs otherworldly aesthetics — and the resulting works hold these opposite ends of the spectrum, and everything in between. She was born and raised in Oakland, CA, and has been equally influenced by the history of conceptual art, Bay Area rappers, Hello-Kitty, car culture, and ADHD.

Sadie Barnette is the recipient of the 2017 James D. Phelan Artadia Award.