Betye Saar

(Skip to bullet points (best for students))

Born: 1926

Summary of Betye Saar

Betye Saar’s work is characterisd by a deep interest in things and how we utilise them to offer context, connection, validation, meaning, and documentation in our personal and global realities. When she joined a mostly male-dominated group of emerging assemblage artists in the 1960s, she was ahead of her time as an African-American woman.

Since then, her work has come to symbolise a bridge bridging the past, present, and future; an arc that offers a glimpse of what it has meant for the artist to be black, female, spiritual, and part of a world ever-evolving via its technologies to find itself strongly impacted by global influences.

Her work is now fully surrounded by the same universe of historical relics that spurred her first journey into painting, and this kaleidoscopic study into modern identity echoes across her whole career. Saar’s art has come to symbolise a decades-long journey through the environmental, cultural, political, racial, and economic problems of her lifetime through a symbolically complex visual language.

Saar’s art was characterised by her studies of her personal racial identity as well as the communal Black identity. Her contributions to the burgeoning Black Arts Movement included the presentation of spiritual and indigenous artefacts from other “Black” cultures to reflect the inner resonances we find when exploring fellow community, as well as the use of stereotypical “Black” objects and images from popular culture to spotlight the tendrils of American racism.

Similarly, Saar’s experience as a woman in the emerging Feminist movement was reflected heavily in her work: washboards, ironing boards, clothes, and other household objects emerge as odes to women’s labour, reimagined as images of the creative feminine voice breaking from its limitations.

Spirituality is essential to Saar’s work, especially the branches that veer on the border of magical and alchemical activities, similar to much of what has been witnessed historically in African and Oceanic religious lineages. Saar’s fascination with totems, “mojos,” amulets, necklaces, and other religious artefacts, as well as the meanings attached to them, continues to inspire him.

Saar’s work is defined by a ravenous, underlying interest for the mystical and how its constant, unseen presence in our lives contributes to the formation of our reality. “She says,” she says “It’s likely that the mysterious changing talents by which dreams, memories, and experience create art cannot be communicated to others. But I like to think I’m capable of trying.”

Childhood

Betye Irene Saar was born to middle-class parents Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson (a seamstress), who met at the University of California, Los Angeles, while they were both students. She has no extended relatives and is of mixed African-American, Irish, and Native American ancestry.

Since he was a child, Saar has been exposed to religion and spirituality. Her father was a Methodist Sunday school teacher, and her mother was an Episcopalian. The family became members of the Christian Science church when her father died in 1931 from renal disease. She was also acquainted with a large number of Buddhists.

As a child, Saar possessed clairvoyant powers. She recalls having the ability to foresee situations such as her father missing the trolley. She believes that these powers vanished once her father died. She, her mother, younger brother, and sister then relocated to Los Angeles’ Watts area to live with her paternal grandmother, Irene Hannah Maze, a quilt maker.

Later, Saar’s maternal great-aunt Hattie Parson Keys and her husband Robert E. Keys moved the family to Pasadena, California. Hattie was a powerful character in her life who served as a strong Black female role model. In that house, Saar recalls her mother tending to a garden “Nature must be present in your life in some way to make you feel genuine. In politics, the basic line is: one planet, one people. And we’ve come a long way since then.”

Saar had a lively imagination as a youngster and was intrigued by fairy stories. She liked to collect trinkets, which she would then repair and reuse into new creations. During their summer trips back to Watts, she and her siblings would “treasure-hunt” in her grandmother’s backyard, collecting bottle caps, feathers, buttons, and other objects, which Saar would then transform into dolls, puppets, and other presents for her family.

While growing up and seeing time at her grandmother’s house, Saar was also influenced by the Watts towers, which were being erected by Outsider artist and Italian immigrant Simon Rodia. The large-scale architectural project, which consisted of seventeen linked cement and found-object towers, was a genuinely imaginative environment. “You can make art out of anything.” Saar learned through watching the construction. She claims to have been “Simon Rodia’s materials, shattered plates, marine shells, rusted utensils, even corn cobs, all pressed into cement to build spires, piqued my interest. They seemed wonderful to me.”

Early Life

After high school, Saar completed two years of art studies at Pasadena City College before earning a minority student tuition scholarship to attend the University of California, Los Angeles. She graduated with a B.A. in 1947, majoring in Design (a popular professional route for women of colour at the time) and minoring in Sociology. Her initial ambition was to work as an interior designer. “I never saw myself as an artist because I come from a minority household. However, I could instruct others on how to purchase curtains.”

Saar went on to California State University, Long Beach, as well as the University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and the American Film Institute for graduate study. She went to graduate school with the intention of teaching design. She shifted her emphasis and decided to pursue a career as an artist after enrolling in an optional printing course. She remembers, “Making prints was one of my favourite activities. It felt freeing to make the switch to fine art. It provided me the opportunity to try new things.”

Despite the fact that she entered the Printmaking programme, Saar claims that she is not a printmaker “I’ve never considered myself a true printer. I experimented with a variety of approaches.” Her first works were on paper, created using the soft-ground etching method with stamps, stencils, and other objects pressed into her plates. The perceptions that resulted revealed a fascination with spirituality, cosmology, and family.

She married Richard Saar, an Ohio ceramist, in 1952 while still in graduate school, and they had three daughters: Tracye, Alison, and Lezley. Balancing her obligations as a wife, mother, and graduate student presented several problems, and she frequently had to attend class with one of her kids. Alison and Lezley went on to be painters, while Tracye went on to be a writer.

The couple and their children moved to Laurel Canyon, California, in 1962. Saar reminisces, “We were here during the hippy era. Frank Zappa was only down the way. […] Cannabis plants grew in abundance around the canyon […] We were as hippy as hippies can be while remaining responsible.” In 1968, Betye and Richard divorced. Saar has stayed at her Laurel Canyon house, where she now lives and works.

Mid Life

In 1967, Saar saw an exhibition of assemblage pieces by found object sculptor Joseph Cornell, coordinated by Walter Hopps, at the Pasadena Art Museum. According to art historian Ellen Y. Tani, “Assemblage is a method for creating three-dimensional structures by mixing natural or manufactured materials with traditionally non-artistic media such as discovered artefacts. Assemblage, coined by the French artist Jean Dubuffet in the mid-twentieth century, questioned the norms of what constituted sculpture and, more widely, the work of art itself.”

Cornell’s artworks are described by Saar as “jewel-like installations.” His show prompted her to start making her own diorama-like assemblages within boxes and wooden frames fashioned from reclaimed window sashes, frequently merging her own prints and drawings with racist imagery and things she found from yard sales and estate sales. “the use of found objects and the ideas that objects are more than just their material appearances, but have histories and lives and energies and resonances, a sense that objects can connect histories.” says art historian Marci Kwon.

Saar reminisces, “I had a friend who was collecting [offensive] postcards, which I found fascinating. As a result, I began collecting these items. I said to myself, “Wow, this is really nasty, really mean.” This reminds me of the word ‘nigger,’ don’t you think? Many of these items were produced in Japan throughout the 1940s. I believe they are still produced in certain nations. In some ways, it’s as if slavery has ended, but they’ve turned you into a salt shaker to keep you a slave. How can Black people aspire to anything different, I reasoned, if they only see things like this reproduced?”

Saar began her creative career by creating her own greeting card line and collaborating with designer Curtis Tann to create enamelled jewellery under the name Brown & Tann, which they sold out of Tann’s living room. Ebony magazine highlighted Brown and Tann in the Fall 1951 issue. “Like many artists working in California at that time, she played in the spaces between art and craft, not making too much distinction between the two.” curator Helen Molesworth adds.

Saar got engaged in the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, and she utilised her art to explore African-American identity and to confront prejudice in the art world. She met numerous other Black women artists at Jackson’s Gallery 32 in 1970, including watercolorist Sue Irons, printer Yvonne Cole Meo, painter Suzanne Jackson, and pop artist Eileen Abdulrashid. The group worked on Sapphire (You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby), which is regarded as California’s first modern African-American women’s exhibition.

Saar was a founding board member of Womanspace, a Los Angeles-based cultural centre for Feminist art and community created by women artists and art historians in 1973. The next year, she and fellow African-American artist Samella Lewis staged Black Mirror, a group show at Womanspace including Black women artists. The exhibition’s attendance astounded Saar, who noted, “It was opposed by white ladies. It was as though we had vanished.”

A field trip to the National Conference of Artists in Chicago in 1970 with fellow Los Angeles artist David Hammons, during which they toured the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, provided more inspiration for Saar. She was exposed to African and Oceanic art there, and she was enthralled by its ceremonial and mystical characteristics. “The trip opened my eyes to Indigenous art, the purity of it,” she says. All of the big displays were above, and the Africa and Oceania parts were downstairs, with all of the tribal stuff that wasn’t in style at the time and wasn’t considered art.

She returned to Haiti a few years later. “If it’s Haiti and they have voodoo, they will be working with magic,” she says, “and I want to be in a place where there is living magic.” Following these meetings, Saar began to use African symbols instead of Western motifs in her paintings. She also travelled to Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, and Senegal, among other locations. “Wherever I went, I’d go to religious stores to see what they had.” she says of her hunting for artefacts and pictures (especially devotional ones) throughout her journeys.

Following the death of her Aunt Hattie in 1974, Saar felt compelled to explore autobiography through writing and enrolled in a workshop at the University of California at Los Angeles called “Intensive Journal” which was based on American psychotherapist Ira Progroff’s psychological theory and method. She remembers, “Close your eyes and go down into your deepest well, your innermost soul, was one practise. Make a list of everything you encounter there. This was the vision I had. A figure was swimming in the water. I was overcome by a deep sense of melancholy. Right there in class, I began to cry. I then recognised that the figure was, of course, myself.”

Saar began teaching at Cal State Long Beach and Otis College of Art & Design in the late 1970s. Kerry James Marshall, a painter, recounts taking a class with Saar at Otis College in the late 1970s “For the first criticism, we produced a collage in her class. We were then instructed to bring the same collage back the next week, but with alterations, and we continued to change the collage throughout the semester. That gave me the brilliant notion of never letting your work become so valuable that you can’t modify it.”

Marshall also claims: “The way [Saar’s] work embraced the mystical and ceremonial components of African art and culture was one of the things that made it important for African-American artists, especially in the mid-70s. Her work represented the Black Arts Movement’s need for a link to ancestral legacies and alternative belief systems, particularly African belief systems.” “If you’re a mom with three kids, you can’t go to a march,” Saar has said, “but you can make work that deals with your anger.”

Late Life

Saar’s art got bigger in the late 1980s, frequently occupying whole rooms. She started looking into the connection between technology and spirituality. She was an artist in residence at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987, at which time she created Mojotech (1987), one of her biggest works, which merged futuristic/technological and ancient/spiritual elements. She remarked in 1989, “I can no longer categorise the art by saying this is about the occult, this is about shamanism, or this is about so-and-so…. It’s all put together, and it’s solely my responsibility.”

Saar sought to avoid classification in 1990 by stating that she would not participate in exhibits titled “Woman” or “Black” “She said,” she said “I decided not to be a racial or gender separatist. What do I expect the 1990s to bring? Not that race and gender will no longer matter, but that a spiritual equality will develop that will eliminate race and gender concerns.”

When she organised a letter-writing campaign against African-American artist Kara Walker in 1997, Saar became embroiled in a heated debate in the art world about the use of disparaging racial imagery. Walker had earned the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Genius Award that year, and he used discovered pictures to construct silhouetted tableaus centred on the topic of slavery. Walker’s work generated ethically ambiguous scenarios in which everyone, black and white, slave and master, was depicted as corrupt, according to Saar.

Saar continues to live and work at Laurel Canyon, where his platform-like dwellings and gardens are heaped upon each other on the edge of a ravine. The line between personal space and studio is blurry, since every room of the house is crammed with the discovered things and trinkets that Saar has amassed over the years, giving endless inspiration for her creative endeavours.

Saar was a pivotal figure in the postwar American assemblage heritage. According to art historian Ellen Y. Tani, “Saar was one of the few women among [assemblage] artists such as George Herms, Ed Kienholz, and Bruce Conner, who used worn, discarded fragments of consumer society to create tangible meditations on life and death. Saar, like them, values the vitality of old items, but she focuses on racially marked objects and components of visual culture, such as black souvenirs or racist tchotchkes, to create a personal visual political lexicon.”

Tani also notes that “Saar articulated a radically different artistic and revolutionary potential for visual culture and Black Power: rather than produce empowering representations of Black people through heroic or realistic means, she sought to reclaim the power of the derogatory racial stereotype through its material transformation.” in reference to her articulation of a visual language of Black identity.

Saar’s depictions of women, according to art historian Kellie Jones, were a decade ahead of feminist art in the 1970s. Although Saar has frequently opposed to being included under Identity Politics categories such as Feminist art or African-American art, her importance to both of these movements cannot be denied. She has had a significant impact in each of these fields by advocating for an intersectional perspective of identity, in which multiple elements of identity (such as race and gender) are considered concurrently rather than separately.

Molesworth goes on, claiming that “One of Saar’s defining characteristics was her sense of self as both singular – as an individual artist following her own goals and ideas – and as part of a larger continuity of the almost 400-year history of black people in America. Her fascination with various depictions of blackness became a defining feature of her illustrious career.” Similarly, Kwon claims that Saar is “someone who is able to understand that valorizing, especially black women’s history, is itself a political act.”

Contemporary African-American artist Radcliffe Bailey and Post-Black artist Rashid Johnson, both of whom repurpose a variety of found materials, diasporic artefacts, and personal mementos (like family photographs) to be used in mixed-media artworks that explore complex notions of racial identity, share Saar’s attitude toward identity, assemblage art, and a visual language for Black art.

Allison creates bust- and full-length nude sculptures of women of colour, and Lezley creates paintings and mixed-media works that explore themes of race and gender. Since the 1980s, Saar and her daughters Allison and Lezley have dialogued through their art to explore notions of race, gender, and specifically, Black femininity, with Allison creating bust- and full-length nude sculptures of women of colour, and Lezley creating paintings and mixed-media works that explore themes of race and gender Allison and Lezley’s artistic paths are complexly beholden to their mother’s “negotiations within the feminist and black consciousness movements” according to art historian Jessica Dallow.

Famous Art by Betye Saar

Black Girl’s Window

1969

Saar created a silhouette of a Black girl pressing her face and hands on the pane in the huge bottom panel of this reused, aged wooden window frame. Her sole distinguishing characteristics are two blue eyes made of a lens-like substance that appear to blink when the observer shifts positions. Symbols of the moon and stars float around the girl’s head and on the palms of her hands. A depiction of Saar’s astrological sign Leo, two skeletons (one black and one white), and a phrenological chart are among the scenes in the nine smaller panels at the top of the window frame (a disproven pseudo-science that implied the superiority of white brains over Black)

Nine Mojo Secrets

1971

Saar combined personal symbols (such the toy lion, which represents her astrological sign, and the crescent moons and stars, which she had used in previous works) with symbols representing Africa, including the central photograph of an African religious ceremony, which she too had used. Wheat, feathers, leather, fur, shells, and bones were glued to the bottom of the sculpture.

We Was Mostly ‘Bout Survival

2017

Saar reused an antique ironing board for this project, painting a bird’s-eye picture of the slave ship Brookes’ deck (clogged with bodies), which has become a symbol of Black agony and loss. A wooden ship, an ancient bar of soap (which art historian Ellen Y. Tani views as “a surrogate for the woman’s body, worn by labour, her skin perhaps chapped and cracked by hours of scrubbing laundry”), and a washboard with a portrait of a Black woman doing laundry have all been attached to the board.

BULLET POINTED (SUMMARISED)

Best for Students and a Huge Time Saver

Betye Saar’s work is characterised by a deep interest in things and how we utilise them to offer context, connection, validation, meaning, and documentation in our personal and global realities.
When she joined a mostly male-dominated group of emerging assemblage artists in the 1960s, she was ahead of her time as an African-American woman.
Since then, her work has come to symbolise a bridge bridging the past, present, and future; an arc that offers a glimpse of what it has meant for the artist to be black, female, spiritual, and part of a world ever-evolving via its technologies to find itself strongly impacted by global influences.

Her work is now fully surrounded by the same universe of historical relics that spurred her first journey into painting, and this kaleidoscopic study into modern identity echoes across her whole career.
Saar’s art has come to symbolise a decades-long journey through the environmental, cultural, political, racial, and economic problems of her lifetime through a symbolically complex visual language.
Saar’s art was characterised by her studies of her personal racial identity as well as the communal Black identity.

Her contributions to the burgeoning Black Arts Movement included the presentation of spiritual and indigenous artefacts from other “Black” cultures to reflect the inner resonances we find when exploring fellow community, as well as the use of stereotypical “Black” objects and images from popular culture to spotlight the tendrils of American racism.
Similarly, Saar’s experience as a woman in the emerging Feminist movement was reflected heavily in her work: washboards, ironing boards, clothes, and other household objects emerge as odes to women’s labour, reimagined as images of the creative feminine voice breaking from its limitations.
Spirituality is essential to Saar’s work, especially the branches that veer on the border of magical and alchemical activities, similar to much of what has been witnessed historically in African and Oceanic religious lineages.

Saar’s work is defined by a ravenous, underlying interest for the mystical and how its constant, unseen presence in our lives contributes to the formation of our reality.