“I am introducing The New Eagle Creek Saloon into the channels of existing queer histories, but I am also manifesting its own archive, which recognizes the limits of official histories and celebrates the unknown and unknowable. Their eyes at that title, who waged love and fought fiercely to create the world I now walk in,” says Barnette. “This light shines for my queer ‘elders,’ especially the ones who roll While sitting at the bar-surrounded by the sparkly tape player, beer cans and stereo equipment-guests are prompted to wonder: who came before? Who were the Black and queer activists who paved the way for this barstool to be available? Sadie Barnette’s “The New Eagle Creek Saloon” (detail), photo by Robert Divers Herrick, courtesy of The Lab, 2019
The installation glows-physically through neon-lit signs and figuratively through the photos from Barnette’s own archive, enshrined in the shimmering countertop.
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Installation view of Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, The Kitchen, New York, 18 January-6 March 2022 Photo: Adam Reichįar from an exact replica, the artist’s recreation transforms her familial history into a pink, glittery fantasia that simultaneously honors her own personal archive while creating a collective one. The installation (on view now until 6 March) operates in conjunction with moore’s residency and centers on the bar that was owned in 1990 to 1993 by the artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, who also founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party. These dichotomies of queer nightclubs (spaces that have been steadily declining) foregrounds Sadie Barnette‘s The New Eagle Creek Saloon, a new installation presented at The Kitchen in collaboration with The Studio Museum of Harlem which reimagines the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. The club becomes a kind of refuge, a space of possibility and emergence.” To be at a queer club is to be united under sweaty, gyrating flesh, in communion with the DJ’s set, faithful in the righteousness of the moment-in spite of the threat of violence (from the public or police) that has continually haunted queer spaces. “It’s a place where I couldn’t feel the pressure of the fire and brimstone that I was surrounded by.
For queer people, is there a more spiritual yet sacrilegious place than the nightclub? “As someone who grew up in the midwestern United States in a Black Baptist household, the club was an oasis,” says Assistant Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and nightlife resident at New York’s The Kitchen, madison moore (whose pronouns are she/he/they).