The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the United States, is currently presenting Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon. The art exhibition is on view from March 7 - May 19, and recreates the New Eagle Creek Saloon, which was San Francisco’s first black-run gay bar, under the ownership of the artist’s father, Rodney Ellis Barnette. Barnette’s multimedia practice explores the history of oppression faced by black Americans through her own family history and often uses drawing, photography and installation art to tell their stories of repression and resistance. The New Eagle Creek Saloon is curated by Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, who joins STIR for an interview that explores Barnette’s thoughts behind recreating the bar, alongside her father’s difficult history in the San Francisco queer community.

Rodney moved to San Francisco in 1969, intrigued by accounts of the city’s relative sexual freedom. However, he found himself repeatedly marginalised within the LGBTQ community there. As the curator explains, “Queer black and brown people were regularly subjected to discriminatory practices such as having to present multiple forms of identification, or were generally made to feel unwelcome in predominantly white-centred gay bars at the time.” As Rodney has discussed in interviews, racism was so thorough within the San Francisco queer scene, there were even derogatory terms being used to describe white queers who associated with coloured people.

Barnette’s father realised the need to create a safe space for the people he saw as his own: people of colour facing racism in a predominantly white queer culture. In 1990, he purchased the rights to operate the Eagle Creek Saloon from a white man who believed in his vision, transforming it into the New Eagle Creek Saloon. Nearly 35 years later, Barnette has recreated this space, not as a 1:1 replica but as she imagines it. It is glitzy and neon pink, with a large, illuminated sign at the back that reads “Eagle Creek”. This is not to say that the artist’s large scale installation has no tangible connection to its inspiration: Barnette has placed a variety of memorabilia in The New Eagle Creek Saloon, harkening back to her father’s bar and turning the artwork into a historical record of sorts.

The bar attracted a dedicated clientele, many of whom became lifelong friends of Rodney. Its slogan certainly helped muster up patrons: “A friendly place with a funky bass for every race.” News outlets were quick to take notice; in 1991, the Bay Area Reporter published an article meant to dissuade people from visiting establishments such as the New Eagle Creek Saloon by attempting to make a connection between queer-friendly spaces and a murder that had occurred recently. This fear-mongering came the same year that basketball superstar Magic Johnson publicly announced his AIDS diagnosis, and it was not difficult for sensationalist tabloids to launch racially motivated attacks against coloured, queer, or otherwise diverse communities, often through hastily made and spurious connections among race, sexuality, illness and crime.

Rodney and his duly outraged patrons wrote a response to the reporter, successfully demanding that they retract the article. However, despite this victory, the New Eagle Creek Saloon had a relatively short lifespan, remaining open from 1990-93. Financial circumstances forced Rodney to shut it down, and it has remained largely absent from Bay Area queer liberation histories until now. Huldisch explains the artist’s motives behind reimagining the bar, saying “Sadie Barnette created The New Eagle Creek Saloon to honour her father’s legacy and create another queer social space that is open to everyone.”

Sadie Barnette created The New Eagle Creek Saloon to honour her father’s legacy and create another queer social space that is open to everyone. – Henriette Huldisch, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Walker Art Center.

This is not the first time the American artist has used her father’s lived history as a means to explore racism against coloured Americans, as her FBI Project (2016 - ongoing) engages with an over-500 page long dossier of FBI surveillance on Rodney. American domestic security services monitored every aspect of Rodney’s life due to his black activism and his ties to the Black Panther Party, despite his being a decorated Vietnam veteran. Returning to Barnette’s take on the New Eagle Creek Saloon, this artwork is more than an installation—it is a fully functional bar that serves drinks and presents programmes every Thursday, featuring various Twin Cities-based DJs, artists, authors and performers. The two major event series hosted at the space include Come Together, a series of parties and Queer Revolutions, which are focused on music and performance art. The artist has essentially presented audiences with a time capsule that both highlights the struggles faced by queer people of colour and celebrates their agency and camaraderie in creating spaces of love and acceptance despite the odds.

'The New Eagle Creek Saloon' is on view at the Walker Art Center from March 7 - May 19, 2024.