MALENE DJENABA BARNETT

“Her spirit is in me,” Malene Djenaba Barnett says reflectively of her maternal grandmother, a designer who left her life in Saint Vincent to build a future for her family in 1950s New York. “Her creativity. Her ambition.” We’ve been discussing Barnett’s family history, how it drives her to grapple with the limitations and absences of histories of migration in her work in ceramics, collage, glass, woven paper, and textiles. Barnett creates portraits drawn from four photographs of four generations of Black women – her great-grandmother, grandmother, mother, and herself.

Central to much of Barnett’s work, through the many different media she constantly experiments with, is a cool blue/teal color palette, manifesting the rhizomatic significance of the sea in histories of migration and diaspora. The work is joyful, embracing beauty without apology or unnecessary explanation. We see the four subjects appear and reappear, reimagined in different forms, each imbued with a sense of care that feels unexpectedly generous, intimate. The process of transfer, of iteration across material, is a continuous, almost obsessive investigation; driven by the curiosity to see what is left behind when an image is reworked in paper, glass, or clay, Barnett questions who or what is made absent in documented histories of the diaspora and the systems of capital and enslavement that led to it. In the spirit of the personal and poetic practices of writers Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Christina Sharpe, Barnett carves her own path through the wake with a tireless curiosity to explore the possibilities of material and form, devices that hold knowledge and memory of her family's histories across the Caribbean and the United States.

But the telling and retelling in Barnett’s practice is more generative than commemorative. “To live in the Black diaspora is I think to live as a fiction,” Dionne Brand wrote, “– a creation of empires, and also self creation.”[1] Barnett’s process of self creation is also one of reclamation, seeking evidence of transferred versions of herself and her ancestors through her own prolific production and reproduction. She builds on the legacy of the African American experience to consider home, and belonging itself, as a process of making. Through examining her own experience, she invites us to reflect on our deepest-held beliefs about belonging to place and people, and to take agency over our own materials, stories, and histories – to take care with the culture we are responsible for keeping

LEGACY WALL (left)

Color laser printouts. 10’ x 20’.

Installation view.

Photo credit: Neighboring States

MADE FOR MOM and WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND (L,R) (below)

Woven inkjet paper and clay.

Installation view.

Photo credit: Neighboring States

BARNETT’S PROCESS OF SELF CREATION IS ALSO ONE OF RECLAMATION, SEEKING EVIDENCE OF TRANSFERRED VERSIONS OF HERSELF AND HER ANCESTORS THROUGH HER OWN PROLIFIC PRODUCTION AND REPRODUCTION.

MOM’S SMILE, GRANNY’S EYES (left)

Woven inkjet paper. 90” x 60”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States

MADE FOR MOM (opposite page)

Woven inkjet paper. 90” x 64”.

Photo credit: Neighboring States