Sadie Barnette: 28 @ Jessica Silverman
As part of Nexus: SF/Bay Area Black Art Week, presented by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), the gallery will host an exhibition walkthrough with the artist, led by Cornelia Stokes, Assistant Curator of the Art of the African Diaspora at SFMOMA and MoAD on Friday, October 2, from 5–7 pm.
Jessica Silverman is pleased to present Sadie Barnette‘s second solo exhibition with the gallery titled “28” as it is the 28th solo exhibition of the artist’s career to date. On view September 10 through October 24, the show features new colored-pencil drawings and a new installation in ash and poplar wood that asks questions about perspective and legibility. Throughout the show, Barnette explores the history of abstraction, the social life of language, and the unconscious insights of the mundane. The work in “28” is as intellectual as it is embodied, revealing the significance of a single mark, and the multiple meanings of an ordinary phrase.
Concurrent with “28” at Jessica Silverman are Sadie Barnette’s solo exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska on view through January 3, 2027, and the site-specific photomural “How to Fly” on view at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles, through October 3, 2027.
In “28,” Barnette recasts the language of postwar American abstraction, challenging the presumed neutrality of its elemental forms. Familiar signs shift in scale, substance, and meaning. In Barnette’s hands, the ordinary becomes open and expansive.
Sadie Barnette (b. 1984, Oakland, CA) has a BFA from CalArts and an MFA from University of California, San Diego. Barnette has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; SFMOMA, CA; San José Museum of Art; The Kitchen, New York; Pomona College, Los Angeles and Pitzer College Art Galleries, Los Angeles; ICA Los Angeles; The Lab, San Francisco; Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, Haverford College, PA; and Manetti Shrem Museum, UC Davis. Barnette is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Creative Capital Award, United States Artists Fellowship, Paulson Fontaine Press residency, Studio Museum in Harlem residency, Artadia Award, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture residency, and the inaugural Artist Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Black Studies Collaboratory, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; LACMA, CA; de Young, San Francisco, CA; Brooklyn Museum; Pérez Art Museum, Miami; Guggenheim Museum, NY; Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Blanton Museum at UT Austin, TX; San José Museum of Art, CA; Oakland Museum of California; Berkeley Art Museum; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, among others. Recent commissions include Bay Area Walls at SFMOMA, a large-scale photomural at California African American Museum on view through October 2027, and a permanent, site-specific installation at the Los Angeles International Airport that is forthcoming in 2027. Barnette lives and works in Oakland, CA.