A Daughter’s Reclamation of Her Father’s Past

Can you describe what’s going on in the work? It’s made from two pages of the 500-page surveillance file that the F.B.I. amassed on my father, Rodney Barnette, who, in 1968, founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party. My family filed an F.O.I.A. request in 2011 and about five years later, we finally received the dossier.

The folder is at once chilling, emotional, disturbing and violent. Surveillance sometimes sounds like an innocuous information-collecting process, but it’s often harassment, intimidation and agent provocateurs. In 1969, because of his political activism, my father was fired from his job at the post office. My initial reaction to these documents was: One, this is terrifying, and two, I’m lucky that my dad lived and I’m lucky that I’m alive. I thought, How can I reclaim this material? How can I highlight my father and our family history, which is the history of so many other families in this country? So the work is definitely about reclamation and repair to some degree, but it doesn’t intend to fix the harm per se. It’s more about a journey of repair. Or about repair as a practice, a meditation.

I created a giant stencil, a machine cut it out, then I laid it onto paper and brushed graphite over the surface. The result looks like a carbon copy. There’s a ghostly element to the white-on-black text. I’m always careful to interact with the source material but not to compete with it — or change any of the factual information.

At 4 by 5 feet, the diptych is pretty large. I really wanted it to confront you on a human scale. The first panel shows a page dated May 25, 1972. It’s from a time when the F.B.I. essentially lost my father. I love this slippery moment of the unknown. The page says “residence unknown” and “employment unknown.” The agency later found his address because it had been monitoring subscriptions to “The People’s World,” the communist newspaper.

The second panel is a mug shot, which looks almost like a screen-printed political poster, because the photograph had been photocopied and re-photocopied so many times. I was thinking about how mug shots instantly criminalize and dehumanize someone, how they turn them into a number. I imagined this photo on hundreds of F.B.I. desks, and how, to its agents, my father was an expendable person, an “extremist.” My experiment was: If I draw this image by hand, through some alchemy of love and labor, can I turn it into something else? Can I turn it into a portrait of a father daring to imagine a new world? It was really gratifying to draw the roses in colored pencil. The colors pop against the graphite in a way that makes the blooms look like stickers. I was thinking about domestic spaces and rituals of care, how we give each other flowers to say “I love you” or at funerals to mourn and memorialize loved ones.