Eliana Willis

Lita Albuquerque’s electric blue sculpture of a woman, seated in a meditative lotus pose, sits atop a gigantic rock overlooking the sand in AlUla, Saudi Arabia’s ancient desert region. Now the work, which was installed during the first edition of Desert X AlUla in 2020, and purportedly marking the first public showing of a female figure in the kingdom, can be viewed from a pool lounger at a new eco-friendly luxury resort, Habitas AlUla.
Albuquerque’s sculpture, titled NAJMA, is symbolic of Desert X AlUla’s historic launch two years ago. The woman’s calm focus against her breathtaking natural backdrop, is reflective of the country’s determination to build an art ecosystem in AlUla, despite the chaos and controversy that surrounds it, including the ongoing war with neighboring Yemen, boycotts over the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and other human rights violations.
Despite the global pandemic, Saudi Arabia, closed off to the world for decades, has continued its ambitious plans for development, which are part of Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030.” Desert X AlUla, which takes its cue from the Land Art movement of the late ‘60s and ‘70s, is a major part of that agenda. This year the biennial, which was organized again in partnership with the Saudi Royal Commission of AlUla, features commissioned work by 15 international artists (open now until March 30).
Shadia Alem, I Have Seen Thousands of Stars and One Fell in AlUla (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
The message, say Desert X organizers, is the same in Saudi Arabia as it is in the biennial’s other site, the Coachella Valley: Focus on the art, its relationship with the land, and the plurality of artistic voices and cultures represented.
“The mood now is that the artists don’t need to explain themselves anymore,” Reem Fadda, a curator of the 2022 edition alongside Neville Wakefield and Raneem Farsi, told Artnet News. “There is no need for anyone to explain or defend themselves. They are here to speak their minds, concerns, and anxieties that are universal. The artists have nothing to prove.”
Some participating artists also spoke of wanting to look beyond the government’s actions. “You have the choice to engage in dialogue and change the narrative or push it forward or not,” artist Shezad Dawood told Artnet News. “There was something about the particular situation in AlUla, the ancient civilizations, the geology, those are all things that interest me.”
But while frustration and backlash, particularly from the United States, still linger, Susan Davies, Desert X’s president and founder, said that “the dust is settling.”
“Overall, there have been many disappointments, not in terms of the art, but because every story that ran last time dug for the negative,” she said. “This is not the journalism I grew up with in the United States. It’s about what is the easy story, not what is the interesting story or what are the two sides of the story. It’s heartbreaking.”
Shezad Dawood, Coral Alchemy I (Dipsastrea Speciosa) (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
Despite its critics, the seeds are being sowed in AlUla for a future art ecosystem, and the biennial can arguably be viewed as a catalyst.
This year, the event is part of the first edition of the AlUla Arts Festival, where six international artists who are part of the AlUla Arts Residency have created work in-situ amid a verdant oasis. There’s also a photography exhibition in AlUla Old Town, a show at the Maraya Concert Hall featuring works by Saudi artists, and Swiss art collector and long-time Saudi resident Pierre Sigg’s newly launched Sigg Art Residency AlUla—the only independent, private initiative in the otherwise government-funded lineup of events.
The desert is the real curator of this edition of Desert X AlUla, which is now taking place in a larger location, the Al Mutadil valley. Staged under the theme of “Sarab,” meaning “mirage” in Arabic, the works, which were created freely without any guidelines by the organizers, are anchored in history, literature, and the physical reality of being in the desert. The art embodies man’s desire to control nature, but also nature’s elusiveness—which, as so many works demonstrate, usually escapes human command.
The artworks are subtler, more unassuming, humbler, and smaller in some instances than the more grandiose creations of the first edition. This year’s works interact and collaborate with the thousands of year-old rock formations, rather than compete with it.
“No work can beat the greatest artwork here, which is the surroundings—the rock art formations themselves,” Dawood told Artnet News.
“It’s a lovemaking with nature,” Fadda said during the press conference.
The artworks relay messages on climate change, human progress, the land, and ancient history. “We are living in a time of climate emergencies and places like AlUla are precious,” said Wakefield. “The works shed light on topics important to the desert but also to the world at large.”
Dawood’s large coral-like forms, Coral Alchemy (Dipsastrea Speciosa), seem to have landed like a meteoroid from outer space. While one is prominently placed, the other is embedded high up within a rock formation, its color nearly matching its surroundings. Through the works, Dawood explores the idea of the geo-biological relationship between the desert floor (at one time most of AlUla was underwater) and the nearby Red Sea. Moreover, the sensitive surfaces of the works change color according to heat reflected from the sun.
Further up, Palestinian artist Khalil Rabah’s Grounding presents a mirage of olive trees—which do not grow in AlUla. Displaced from their indigenous land and longing to be repatriated, the trees represent the Palestinian crisis.
Serge Attukwei Clottey, Gold Falls (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
An unmissable sight is Gold Fall, a long tapestry-like work made of cut squares from yellow plastic water containers draped over a rock formation by Ghanaian artist Serge Attakwei Clottey. The artist, who exhibited previously at Desert X Coachella, is the first and only African artist in the AlUla edition. While discussing the politics of the ubiquitous yellow water gallon in West Africa, the work, the artist explains, is also about forming a friendship with the desert.
“The history of the desert from an African perspective represents struggle, death from migration, water scarcity, and sadness,” Clottey told Artnet News. “But having an exhibition in the desert brings life and humanity to the place and to nature. Using the gallon here as a representation of water scarcity, I wanted to change the perception in this space as to how water can represent hope and life.”
Participating in the exhibition, added Clottey, is a way to see more African artists represented  internationally.
The curation of the works is tighter and more thought out than the first edition, where the air felt more revolutionary and celebratory. Works have been placed in dialogue not just with nature but with each other.
In front of Clottey’s water gallon are the 364 pyramid-shaped concentric sand mounds of American land artist Jim Denevan’s Angle of Repose. Made in collaboration with local AlUla residents all who volunteered, the magnitude and repetitive nature of the circles, which become smaller as one enters the center of the work, is at once otherworldly and distorting in vision—both aims of Denevan’s as he tries to shape the visitor’s experience in the desert.
Shaikha Al Mazrou, Measuring the Physicality of Void (2022). Photo: Lance Gerber.
Behind Denevan’s majestic sand creations are the lengthy steel-made inflated sculptures of Emirati artist Shaikha Al Mazrou, titled Measuring the Physicality of the Void, wedged into voids within the rocks. Tensely balanced in the landscape, if it weren’t for their shiny surfaces, one might not know they were there. Further up is Saudi artist Abdullah Al-Othman’s Geography of Hope, a gigantic anamorphous-shaped flat steel work that replicates a body of water. According to the artist, it represents the experience of a mirage, and the hope that it brings in the desert when one might have lost their way.
The act of viewing the works in Desert X is physically laborious, which adds to the experience. To reach Saudi artist Ayman Zedani’s soundscape and installation, The Valley of the Desert Keepers, one must walk up a steep rock following long yellow and green rope. The sound of crunching rocks, akin to that of glass, conjures up its own kind of music that immediately merges with Zedani’s recording of an Arabic narration of the names of desert plants, blasted through speakers on the rock. The experience is at once meditative and surreal, and when one looks over the crevice, Claudia Comte’s Dark Suns Bright Waves appears—a line of large rectangles with black-and-white stripes exploring the patterns found in nature.
Works by Saudi artists delve deep into the ancient histories of AlUla. Palestinian Saudi-born Dana Awartani’s concave geometric structure made from sandstone, Where the Dwellers Lay, takes its inspiration from ancient Nabatean tombs in AlUla. It invites viewers to take a seat inside the work, as if it were a tomb or a throne, where they can appreciate the art and the surrounding space.
Sultan bin Fahad’s mud structure, made in collaboration with local AlUla residents, entered from a long pathway into a circular enclosed space where a glass sphere shape, embossed with four protective symbols used in Nabatean tombs, points to the sky. It pays reverence to the history of the Desert Kite, after which it takes its name.
Desert X AlUla landscape. Photo by Lance Gerber, courtesy RCU and Desert X.
“This is where you need to come on your own to meditate and become one with the history and the land,” the artist said.
But who will come to meditate and contemplate next to these artworks? The elegantly clad art world crowd arrived on February 10, Desert X AlUla’s VIP opening. Among them was Alicia Keys who was to sing the following day at the Maraya Art Center. She twirled in the center of Denevan’s sand mounds, her white dress echoing that of a whirling dervish as onlookers snapped her photo.
Will the audience for these monumental artworks be limited to the few that can afford the journey to view their magic?
“Many Saudis will come,” said artist Moath Alofi. “There are now direct flights from all over the Kingdom to AlUla. We come all the time.”
By 2035 AlUla aims to be able to welcome just two million people annually—a controlled number for a region nearly the size of Belgium so it does not transform into a mass tourism hub.
Perhaps the work that most acutely points to AlUla and its artistic rebirth after thousands of years is Saudi artist Shadia Alem’s shimmering star sculpture, I have seen thousands of stars and one fell in AlUla.
In the shape of a giant origami, it glistens in the sand as if foretelling a prophecy for the area, symbolizing death just as it does rebirth—a cycle of change and renewal—like life itself, and like the present state of Alula as it rises once again. More

The gallery for Sadie Barnette’s current exhibition at the Kitchen is practically pitch black—except for a horseshoe bar ringed with stools. Barnette’s re-creation of the New Eagle Creek Saloon—a gay bar and nightclub, the first Black-owned one in San Francisco, which her father, Rodney Barnette, ran from 1990 to 1993—sits in the middle of the room, lit up in neon pink and purple. 
When I visited the celebrated art institution in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood, where Barnette’s installation will be on view through March 6, a family with two young children walked in behind me. They let out a collective gasp. The kids ran up to the installation, instantly amused by seeing their reflections in the mirrored bar. They then stood in front of the installation, underneath the neon “Eagle Creek” sign and near the glittered boom box they’d just been gawking at, and signaled for their parents to take a picture. After that, they all left.
Installation view, Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” at the Kitchen, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
And this is what the installation will be for a lot of people. It’s dramatic. It’s fun. It sparkles. On the days when madison moore, assistant professor of queer studies at Virginia Commonwealth University and the Kitchen’s first nightlife and club culture resident, is hosting DJ events in the gallery, it’ll be a raucous dance party, invoking the spirit of queer nightlife.
As Barnette sees it, expressions of pleasure and joy are legitimate responses to the work—the bar, in its day, generated quite a bit of both for its patrons. Digging a little deeper into “New Eagle Creek,” though, there is far more to the installation than first meets the eye—which is why, in the last two years, it has traveled to venues including the Lab in San Francisco and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This presentation at the Kitchen, and in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, is its first on the East Coast.
Installation view, Sadie Barnette, “The New Eagle Creek Saloon,” at the Kitchen, New York. Photo: Adam Reich.
Man, Father, and Muse
Sadie, now 37, was seven years old when her dad first took her to the New Eagle Creek Saloon in the Haight. At the time, the bar was sponsoring a float for the 1992 San Francisco Pride Parade. 
Rodney opened the bar “because of the racism that he and his multiracial group of gay friends experienced at white gay bars in San Francisco,” Barnette explains. “So it really was out of necessity—for the dignity of being cute and Black and gay in San Francisco in the 1990s that he set up this bar. And it really ends up being kind of a community center, a safe haven.”
As Barnette remembers it, the theme for the float was “Black people through the ages.” She was dressed up as a Black Victorian. The event conjures up memories of being surrounded by an exuberant group of Black pharaohs and Black robots and Black astronauts. It was like being a part of the Black past, present, and future, all at once. From that moment on, the bar lived on in her imagination as a “larger than life; a mythical, fantastical space,” she recalls. “So it didn’t make sense to make my installation look like the original bar. It made sense to make it look like me dreaming in my aesthetic about the bar.”
The “New Eagle Creek Saloon” was hardly the first time Barnette has pulled from her family’s history for her work. Back in high school, she says she took up photography as “a way of seeing the world or a way of engaging with the world as a witness”; realizing how political even her own personal history was, she has nurtured a documentary impulse ever since. “I was entranced by the stories and the performing of stories and the gatherings and the history and seeing so much of American history contained just within the living room,” she says. 
In the last five years or so, the Oakland-based artist has centered her practice on her father’s past. In 2011, when Barnette was working on her MFA at the University of California, San Diego, her father suggested that they submit a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the surveillance file the FBI had once compiled on him. In the 1960s and ‘70s, Rodney was a Black Panther. He founded the Compton chapter of the organization in 1968; stood guard for Angela Davis as she awaited trial for murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy in 1970; and was for years deeply involved in Black revolutionary activism. 
Sadie Barnette, Family Tree (2021). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco. Photo: John Wilson White.
“I figured the [FOIA documents] would make [their] way to being a part of my work, since my work has always been centered around my family,” Barnette says. 
Her father’s past, in particular, provides direct links to significant movements in Black history still left largely untold, such as the extent to which the Black Panthers influenced American politics and how Black people were active participants in the rise of LGBTQ culture of the late 1980s and early ’90s. 
Sadie Barnette, Untitled (Dad, 1966 and 1968). Courtesy of the artist and Jessica Silverman, San Francisco.
When the FBI documents—500 pages in total, covering seemingly mundane but also intensely private details of her father’s life—arrived four or five years later, Barnette started integrating them into her practice; first, as material in her first solo show in San Francisco, at Jenkins Johnson Gallery in 2016—which ran concurrently with her installation of similar work in a group exhibition at the Oakland Museum of California—and then within countless other shows over the years. In her approach, she doesn’t just display the documents as is. She manipulates them; she marks them up with spray paint, decorates them, tarnishes them—but never lets them escape her personal touch. By doing this, Barnette folds her voice into the construction of her dad’s legacy. She reclaims the parts of the documents that make no sense to her. Because she’s never seen her father as a threat. He’s always just been her dad.
“The project that she did with the FOIA act that she submitted for her father,’” says Legacy Russell, executive director and chief curator at the Kitchen, “that body of work has since become really instrumental and a turning point across her process.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, July 22–December 18, 2021. This exhibition was co-organized with Pitzer College Art Galleries. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
And in recent years, her projects have become even larger and more ambitious in scale—while still directly tied to her father’s life. 
“I knew my dad had this amazing history with his bar. But the story was almost lost to history,” Barnette notes. So why not, she thought, also focus on this other profound period in Rodney’s life? Lately, though, she’s also “really looking to and is excited about fusing those narratives together,” says her dealer Jessica Silverman, “so that they don’t become these two separate issues. They became part of a whole, because that is who he is.” (The artist is also represented by Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles.)
The two narratives might not be so separate anyway. As Barnette puts it, Rodney’s engagement with many different communities—especially marginalized ones—is “just a part of the way that my father moves through the world,” she says, “whether it’s fighting for Angela Davis’s freedom or hosting a bar, I think it’s all about protecting the people.” Barnette’s forthcoming installation at Los Angeles International Airport, scheduled to be unveiled in 2024, will pay homage to efforts to shelter Davis while she was sought by the FBI.
“Here’s one thing that my father said to me that I really appreciated,” Barnette says. “He’s like: when you read the history books, you don’t necessarily need to see your name there, but you just want to know that you were there and participated.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at Pitzer College Art Galleries (Lenzner Family Art Gallery) at Pitzer College, July 22–December 18, 2021. This exhibition was co-organized with the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Beyond the Barnette Orbit 
While it suits her father just fine knowing that he was there and made a difference, Barnette is striving for a little bit more.
“In Sadie’s case, she’s really drawn to thinking about the way in which those who lived these experiences can be the ones that tell their own story,” says Russell. 
In many ways, her work is breathing life into a history on life support. As far as official records of the New Eagle Creek Saloon, Barnette’s work is “not really reintroducing [the archive],” Silverman notes, “because there really never has been one.” 
“There isn’t a National Archives for queer nightlife,” moore says. “Obviously, people have papers that might be related to queer nightlife—such as Langston Hughes, for example, whose papers are at the library and you can find some stuff in there about nightlife—but you have to sort of read between the tea leaves, if you will.”
There has been a growing contingent of artists of late, ranging from Karon Davis to Garrett Bradley, who are intent on filling in gaps within the annals of Black history. And in reevaluating the idea of what that archive can be, “the documentation of [Barnette’s] project over time is in and of itself the archive,” Russell says, becoming much more than simply “the preservation and resurrection of Rodney’s legacy, and the memory of the space that he founded.”
Installation view of “Sadie Barnette: Legacy and Legend” at Pitzer College Art Galleries (Lenzner Family Art Gallery), July 22 to December 18, 2021. This exhibition is co-organized with the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Photography courtesy of Fredrik Nilsen Studio.
Such an archive can also be meaningfully integrated in other arenas. In bringing this installation to the Kitchen, Russell hopes to explore “a really important history that creates a through line between different parts of New York City history,” she continues, “[because] this project steps right into those intersections. It’s a project about city change and gentrification. It’s a project about the whitewashing of Black space. It’s a project about the kind of migration and journeying of Black people and Black economies.”
When Barnette takes stock of her own life, as she’s done with her father’s for her work, she realizes that she is, and always has been, a storyteller. 
“The title of the show that was just at Jessica Silverman was ‘Inheritance,’” Barnette says, “and I really do think of history and stories as a type of inheritance. And it’s a gift. It’s a treasure. It’s also a responsibility.”
“Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon” is on view at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, through March 6.
Follow Artnet News on Facebook: Want to stay ahead of the art world? Subscribe to our newsletter to get the breaking news, eye-opening interviews, and incisive critical takes that drive the conversation forward. More