‘Brave people stepped up to the plate’: remembering the Black Panthers through art

‘I think of my father very much as a kind of collaborator and co-conspirator of this project’ … Sadie Barnette, FBI Drawings Unknown, 2021. Photograph: Courtesy of the artist, Jessica Silverman, San Francisco, and Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Sadie Barnette’s work honours her father’s time in the Black Panther party, a political organisation founded in the tumultuous 1960s that tried to combine socialism, Black nationalism and armed defence against police brutality.

In particular, she takes as raw material a 500-page surveillance file on Rodney Barnette, compiled by J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which described the Black Panthers as the “most dangerous and violence prone of all extremist groups” in America.