Artist, Betye Saar: A friend once said, “All these things in your room, they’re asking, what are we doing here?” And I say, “Don’t worry, one day you’re gonna be art.”
Learning Specialist, Carolina Malagamba: We are looking at a piece by the artist Betye Saar, and the piece is what we call an assemblage, a three-dimensional art piece that is made up of objects that you could find around your house or on the street. So it’s a very inclusive way of making art. Everyone could thrift something, or find something, or reuse, recycle.
But it’s curious to think about why an artist might use a window instead of a canvas.
Betye Saar: I’m a child of the Depression, so I grew up not throwing away anything. I have this collection of half-finished prints, but I don’t throw them away because there’s always a part of it I can recycle into something else. One day, I found an old window, and I thought, How would my prints look in a window?
Carolina Malagamba: There are actually a lot of different materials in this piece. We have cut and pasted painted papers, a plastic figurine. We can also see a daguerreotype in a gold frame—and a daguerreotype is an early form of photography. The eyes are a lenticular print, and what it does is that even if you move a little bit to the side, you feel like the person, the character, is looking at you.
All of the little window panes tell stories. I know that Betye Saar was thinking about her family in one of these. She was thinking about her dad in another one. She was thinking about herself and astrology in another one.
If we had to tell our story, what materials would you use to create that piece?