- 4 days ago
- 1 min read
Sadie Barnette: How to Fly
September 30, 2025 – October 3, 2027, CAAM, Los Angeles
Sadie Barnette’s How to Fly transforms CAAM’s atrium into an expansive field of memory, color, and personal mythology. Created as a site-specific photomural, the work brings together photographs taken by the artist across California with images drawn from her family archive, forming a visual constellation in which private history becomes public monument.
Born and raised in Oakland, Barnette approaches the archive not as a fixed record, but as a living, tender, and imaginative space. Everyday objects and intimate fragments—a birthday cake, a worn copy of Toni Morrison’s Jazz, cars, plants, glitter, and rhinestones—are enlarged, layered, and set against an ombre rainbow ground. Through this abundance of scale, texture, and pattern, Barnette creates a language of celebration that resists hierarchy: the ordinary, the familial, and the decorative become charged with historical and emotional significance.
Describing herself as a “keeper of the past,” Barnette tends to memory with humor, care, and joy. How to Fly honors her own story while opening onto a broader invitation: to recognize the beauty, resilience, and magic embedded in everyday life. The mural asks viewers to see their own loved ones and histories as worthy of preservation, transformation, and flight.
LINK To CAAM, Los Angeles
Courtesy of CAAM, Los Angeles.
