Share + 
Sadie Barnette and Dena Beard

MOVED ONLINE - Sadie Barnette in Conversation with Dena Beard: The New Eagle Creek Saloon

Tue Apr 07, 2020 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

**Please note that this event has been rescheduled to Tuesday, April 7. Due to coronavirus (COVID-19) precautions this event was privately recorded and posted online. View the lecture here, also available in our video archive. Thank you for your understanding.**

For The New Eagle Creek Saloon, artist Sadie Barnette reimagined her father’s bar, the first black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. From 1990 to 1993 Rodney Barnette operated the Eagle Creek Saloon, a family-run business that served a multiracial gay community marginalized by the racist profiling practices of San Francisco’s bar scene at that time. Barnette’s project was two-fold: to re-present and archive the Eagle Creek Saloon via her own vernacular aesthetic, and to host a queer social space where former clientele of the Saloon, guest bartenders, and DJs can participate in ongoing acts of resistance, celebration, activism, and community building. Commissioned by The Lab, Barnette’s installation was activated with a series of free events and culminated as a float in the SF PRIDE Parade on June 30, 2019. Barnette will speak with Dena Beard, director of The Lab, on the process of bringing this project to life.

Whether in the form of drawing, photography or large-scale installation, Sadie Barnette’s work relishes in the abstraction of city space and the transcendence of the mundane to the imaginative. Barnette’s work deals in the currency of the real, in earthly acts of celebration and resistance, but is also tethered to the other-worldly, a speculative fiction, a galactic escape. As the artist says, “This is abstraction in service of everyday magic and survival in America.” Born and raised in Oakland, California, she earned her BFA from CalArts and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally and is in the permanent collections of museums such as LACMA, Berkeley Art Museum, the California African American Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem (where she was also Artist-in-Residence), Brooklyn Museum and the Guggenheim.

Dena Beard is Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco. She received her M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was previously Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She believes it is important to constantly question perceptual and organizational models, deeply engaging with new modes of thinking around the arts. Beard has organized projects with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Sadie Barnette, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Gordon, Anna Halprin, Asher Hartman, Fritzia Irízar, Norma Jeane, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee, Silke Otto-Knapp, Brontez Purnell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. 

For more information, visit artsdesign.berkeley.edu.