My Father’s FBI File is an ongoing project that transforms over 500 pages of surveillance records kept on Rodney Barnette, the artist’s father and a former Black Panther. The artist obtained the documents by filing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO), which targeted and sought to dismantle Black political movements during the 1960s and ’70s. Spanning decades of surveillance, the files detail the government’s attempts to monitor and disrupt Barnette’s life. In response, Barnette enlarged the government’s impersonal records and overlaid them with vivid magenta spray paint and abstract forms and photographs, reclaiming the files as personal and familial artifacts. This gesture reimagines state surveillance as a site of resistance and intimate narrative, challenging the erasure of human stories in bureaucratic systems.

Courtesy of the artist.