Betye Saar

In Betye Saar’s work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades. “I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so…. It’s all together and it’s just my work,” she said in 1989.1
Saar grew up in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, and studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles—a career path frequently foisted upon women of color who were interested in the arts, due to the racism and sexism prevalent in universities at the time. Saar eventually studied printmaking, and her earliest works are on paper. Using the soft-ground etching technique, she pressed stamps, stencils, and found materials into her plates to capture their images and textures. Her prints are notably concerned with spirituality, cosmology, and family, as in Anticipation (1961) and Lo, The Mystique City (1965).
Saar’s visit to an exhibition of work by Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 profoundly influenced her own artmaking. Cornell’s practice of collecting and arranging found objects into assemblage boxes inspired her to do the same. She began by inserting her own prints and drawings into window frames, as with Black Girl’s Window, an iconic autobiographical work that also signaled a new interest in addressing race and contemporary events in her art.
After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her mystical assemblages became increasingly radical. Saar has since repurposed washboards, jewelry boxes, and racist ephemera as a way of reclaiming images and artistic power. For her best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), Saar arms a Mammy caricature with a rifle and a hand grenade, rendering her as a warrior against not only the physical violence imposed on black Americans, but also the violence of derogatory stereotypes and imagery.
The artist has also repeatedly turned to her family and their history as sources for her work. “Keep for Old Memiors” (1976) includes fragments of letters and photographs saved by the artist’s great aunt Hattie, framed by a pair of women’s gloves that suggest, among other things, the tactility of accessing a physical record of one’s life. The intimacy and scale of Saar’s work encourages a personal connection to the artist and her experience. “To me the trick is to seduce the viewer. If you can get the viewer to look at a work of art, then you might be able to give them some sort of message.”2 Over the course of her now six-decade career, Saar has continued to make work that honors or critiques the familiar and mines the unknown. “It may not be possible to convey to someone else the mysterious transforming gifts by which dreams, memory, and experience become art. But I like to think that I can try.”3
Introduction by Esther Adler, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Nectar Knuckles, Curatorial Fellow, 2019
Beryl Wright, ed., The Appropriate Object (Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1989), 54.
Robert Barrett, “Conversation with the Artist,” in Betye Saar: Secret Heart, ed. Lizetta LeFalle-Collins (Fresno, CA: Fresno Art Museum, 1993), 29.
Betye Saar quoting a statement she wrote in 1986 to Leah Ollman. “Betye Saar: In the Studio,” Art in America, June/July 2019.
The research for this text was supported by a generous grant from The Modern Women's Fund.
Exhibitions
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412: Domestic Disruption
Ongoing
MoMA
Collection gallery
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Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window
Oct 21, 2019–Jan 4, 2020
MoMA
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From the Collection:
1960–1969 Mar 26, 2016–Mar 19, 2017
MoMA
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Take an Object
Aug 22, 2015–Feb 28, 2016
MoMA
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Now Dig This!
Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980Oct 21, 2012–Mar 11, 2013
MoMA PS1
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Betye Saar has
6 exhibitionsonline.
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Betye Saar To Catch a Unicorn 1960
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Betye Saar In the Dell 1960
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Betye Saar El Gato 1960
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Betye Saar Samsara 1960
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Betye Saar Anticipation 1961
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Betye Saar By the Sea 1961
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Betye Saar Les Enfants d'Obscurité 1961
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Betye Saar Lo, The Pensive Peninsula 1961
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Betye Saar Amid Hallucinatory Moons 1962
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Betye Saar The Wounded Wilderness 1962
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Betye Saar Fireside 1963
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Betye Saar Flight 1963
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Betye Saar In the Sunflower Patch 1963
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Betye Saar The Beast that Pounds the Devil's Dust 1964
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Betye Saar The Beastie Parade 1964
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Betye Saar The Big Beastie Parade 1964
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Betye Saar Black Angus Meets Big Brahma 1964
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Betye Saar Carnival 1964
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Betye Saar Enchantress and Twilight Bird 1964
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Betye Saar Enfant in the Garden 1964
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Betye Saar Girl Children 1964
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Betye Saar Mystic Chart for an Unemployed Sorceress 1964
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Betye Saar Not All Turtles Sing 1964
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Betye Saar The Quick & the Dead 1964
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Betye Saar Rojo Toro 1964
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Betye Saar Sorceress with Seven Assorted Birds 1964
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Betye Saar He Who... 1965
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Betye Saar Lo, The Mystique City 1965
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Betye Saar The Man from Phrenology 1965
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Betye Saar The Mystic Flag 1965
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Betye Saar The Palmistry Chart 1965
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Betye Saar Summer Symbol 1965
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Betye Saar We The People 1965
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Betye Saar Celestial Scene 1966
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Betye Saar House of Tarot 1966
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Betye Saar The Mystic Galaxy 1966
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Betye Saar Palm of Love 1966
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Betye Saar Phrenology Man Digs Sol y Luna 1966
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Betye Saar A Siege of Sirens 1966
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Betye Saar Winter Symbol 1966
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Betye Saar The Mystic Galaxy 1968
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Betye Saar Black Girl's Window 1969
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Betye Saar Two of Every Sort c. 1966
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Betye Saar Fragments 1976
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Betye Saar "Keep for Old Memiors" 1976
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Betye Saar The Invitation 1991
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