By Carolina A. Miranda

The artist, who died just short of her 100th birthday, subverted racist tropes by turning mammy dolls into warriors and presenting the breadth of the Black experience.

In 1972, the Rainbow Sign, a Black cultural center in Berkeley, Calif., put on a group show that featured a small work by Betye Saar. Though not even a foot tall, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), her box assemblage that featured a mammy doll wielding a rifle and a grenade, landed with a seismic jolt. Its message of Black power and autonomy made her into a central figure of the Black Arts Movement and ultimately helped catapult her to fame.

By Carolina A. Miranda

Betye Saar, a Los Angeles artist who transformed collections of bigoted bric-à-brac — Sambo dolls, ceramic mammies and crude renderings of pickaninnies — into potent works of assemblage that mined the searing history of race in the United States, and whose works influenced generations of artists, has died. She was 99.

By Jori Finkel

Betye Saar, the groundbreaking California assemblage artist who confronted stereotypes about Black women through her dreamy memento boxes as well as her arresting images of Aunt Jemima armed with rifles and other weapons, died on Sunday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 99.

Roberts Projects is deeply saddened to share that Betye Saar passed away in her sleep in the early morning of Sunday, July 26 in Los Angeles, just four days before her 100th birthday.

A pioneering artist and a leading figure in the assemblage movement, Betye Saar will be remembered for a body of work that powerfully interrogated African American identity, spirituality and the intersections between diverse cultures.

By Tara Anne Dalbow

Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as always: in the studio.

In a small, light-filled room near the top of the Laurel Canyon home where she’s lived since 1962, Saar spends the morning filling sketchbooks with watercolors. Symbols that the pioneering assemblage artist has been “remixing” for more than seven decades — stars, moons, eyes, hands — emerge in vibrant washes of magenta, teal and her favored crepuscular blues.

by Rose Garcia and Madison Browning

There is a certain disjointed element about Los Angeles that disturbs those who haven't lived within it. So vastly different from its East Coast peers, Los Angeles doesn't read like a work of art so much as it does a maze of class disparity and smog. But growing up within this maze grants its children a kinder, keener eye. The pieces of the city come together to form a home entirely unique to each inhabitant. A special handful of these inhabitants—like epochal multimedia artist Betye Saar—eek special meaning in each part part, finding a beautiful, whole universe within these disparate pieces. 

By Ben Davis

They include Betye Saar, Jeffrey Gibson, and—just in time for America 250—Jasper Johns.

Another birthday shapes the list: Betye Saar will turn 100 in July. She is widely loved by curators, and is receiving a tribute show at the Palmer Museum that celebrates her impact on other artists, plus a celebration of her doll collection at the New York Historical Society. And Saar was honored in June at MoMA‘s Party in the Garden—alongside with Martin Puryear, another storied Black artist who had a uniquely good month.

By Kaitlyn Greenidge

An exhibit of Betye Saar’s doll collection, the Schomburg Centennial, and the new book They Stole A City point to a changing America.

A few weeks ago, I went to the New York Historical to see the staging of its upcoming exhibit “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls.” The artist, who turns 100 in July, collected Black dolls throughout her artistic practice.

By Ariana Marsh

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I’m walking side-by-side with Betye Saar, the legendary Angeleno assemblage artist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement. She’s wearing a tonal gray sweater and coordinating pants with flashes of pale blue cheetah print (a perennial favorite of Saar’s) on her shirt and scarf, her silver hair twisted into a soft top knot, her fingers stacked with flea market jewelry collected over decades. We’re joined by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.

By Jasmine Weber

Nearing the occasion of her 100th birthday, an exhibition at the New York Historical celebrates Saar’s promised gift of her collection of dolls to the institution.

Betye Saar has been accumulating ephemera — taxidermied animals, cages, computer parts, and more — throughout her life. Since the 1970s, she has crafted these found objects into assemblage artworks that often subvert racist artifacts and images, beginning with her famed sculpture “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972). 

By Sahir Ahmed

Eight creatives reflect on what their mothers taught them, and what they hope to pass on to their own children.

A mother can make a house feel larger, a crisis smaller, and a phone call overdue. She is often the family's unofficial archivist, event planner, negotiator, medic, and emotional weather system all at once. The strange genius of motherhood is that it can feel simultaneously invisible and all-powerful. Somehow, her voice is always the one her children hear first; though, what she gives rarely divulges itself directly, and almost never expires. 

By Julissa James

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that.

By Dominique Fluker 

On May 2nd, the Hammer Museum at UCLA welcomed cultural leaders, artists, collectors, and patrons of the arts at the 21st annual Gala in the Garden. During the evening, trailblazing artist Betye Saar was honored for her profound contributions to society through her work, in front of industry peers, patrons, and her loving and supportive family members. Renowned visual artist, Saar was born in 1926 in Los Angeles, and became a pioneer of second-wave feminist and post­war black nationalist aesthetic, given her iconic reclamation of the Aunt Jemima figure in works such as The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), inspired by the civil rights movement, and reclaims the "mammy" stereotype, transforming her into a revolutionary figure armed for liberation. 

By Kate Simons

Gray skies didn’t prevent L.A.’s arts community from getting fancy in support of the Hammer Museum’s annual Gala in the Garden to celebrate gala honorees Betye Saar and television writer and producer Darren Star. At 99, Saar is among L.A.’s most esteemed and accomplished living artists. Her career has spanned more than seven decades, with an early focus on rejecting white feminism and reclaiming the Black female body. Civil rights activist Angela Davis traced the start of the Black women’s movement to the creation of Saar’s 1972 assemblage piece, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.”

Betye Saar’s Black Dolls honors the renowned artist’s 100th birthday and celebrates a landmark promised gift to The New York Historical of her collection of more than 100 Black dolls. Ranging from rag dolls handmade by Black women for both the Black and white children in their care to mass-produced toys and tourist souvenirs, some of which were borne of racism and perpetuate stereotypes, the collection includes Hoo Doo Woman (1974), the only Black doll designed and created by Saar herself. 

By Alexandria Ryahl 

In 1994, while attending an artist residency at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in northern Italy, Betye Saar experimented with using a Polaroid camera as an artist’s tool in tandem with her skills in printmaking, collage and design. Photographing everything from gardens and native flora to the plethora of objects and architectural details in the villas throughout town, Saar began creating what she referred to as “altered Polaroids:” striking photographic compositions on a miniature scale that synthesized core elements of her practice while evolving towards something bigger.

SPACE IS THE PLACE is a Hammer Contemporary Collection exhibition that takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914–1993), a Black American experimental jazz composer and musician known for his radical and esoteric views on Black liberation. The selected works in the exhibition consider “space” as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space. SPACE IS THE PLACE comprises installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multi-media works by nearly thirty artists.

By Chris Gardner

The Westwood institution has zeroed in on veteran TV creator Darren Star and notable artist Betye Saar as honorees for the 21st annual Gala in the Garden, set to take place on May 2. The event, Hammer’s largest fundraiser, “honors artists and innovators who have made profound contributions to society through their work,” per the museum. It does so in front of local artists, collectors, patrons, celebrities and other art world insiders.

By Lilia Rocio Taboada

One recognition is the understanding of one’s practice and the personal capacity to learn and shift. Wood + Shadows by Betye Saar carefully delineates this light-made line between interior and exterior worlds. Saar, resident faculty during 1985, worked in assemblage since the early 1960s, often combining found images and materials referencing otherworldly entities and personal history into frames. These frames were shaped in some instances as windows, signaling perspective from one space into another.

Amid the turbulent decades of the mid-20th century, African American and Afro-Atlantic diaspora artists sought to celebrate Black culture and advance the struggle for civil rights. Photographic images contributed in myriad ways to the lively exchange of pan-African ideas that propelled the Black Arts Movement. See how an incredible range of artists and activists—from studio and street photographers to graphic designers and community organizers—used photography as a tool for social change.

By Leigh-Ann Jackson

Not only is Betye Saar a living legend, but the prolific L.A. artist continues to add to her impressive oeuvre day by day. As her centennial birthday approaches this July, Saar shows no signs of slowing down. She still routinely creates art and continues to garner headlines and accolades. Last year, she was honored with the distinction of “Icon Artist” at the Art Basel Awards.

Featuring works from the Addison’s collection, Little Boxes invites viewers into a nuanced exploration of the square and the rectangle, two essential geometric forms that have served as powerful tools in artistic expression. The exhibition explores how the simple “box” serves both as a practical strategy for pictorial composition and as a symbolic container for complex narratives.

Chicago-born, internationally renowned contemporary artist Simone Leigh brings together diverse works from the Art Institute’s collections of African, American, and European art to explore the relationships between these objects.

Then Margo thought of Betye Saar, whose work, like Cornell’s, is marked by a roving spirit of wonder. Although born a generation apart (Cornell in 1904, Saar in 1926), the two artists share a childlike quality that transforms itself in their work into an eerie wisdom. Then, almost by chance, we discovered a direct link between Cornell and Saar. In 1967, the 41-year-old Saar came upon an extensive exhibition of Cornell’s work at Pasadena’s Huntington Museum; it delighted and inspired her. Even now, in her late 90s, Saar still speaks about this exhibition as crucial to her artistic practice.

Drawing its title from poet Elizabeth Alexander’s book of the same name, The Black Interior considers the practices of artists who explore the domestic space as creative inspiration and refuge for one’s inner world. The works on view, all from CAAM’s permanent collection, reflect on the objects and memories of home. The shower, the closet, the phone, a photo album, a doily, a handkerchief, masking tape, and a magazine all become expressive materials or generative subjects. Everyday routines and domestic traditions are sources for artistic decisions. From craft and collage to sculpture and video, the works in The Black Interior prompt us to see the imaginative possibilities in our home lives.

Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination.  

The first exhibition to consider photography’s impact on a cultural and aesthetic movement that celebrated Black history, identity, and beauty.

Uniting around civil rights and freedom movements of the 1960s and 1970s, many visual artists, poets, playwrights, musicians, photographers, and filmmakers expressed hope and dignity through their art. These creative efforts became known as the Black Arts Movement.  

By Victoria Valentine

WITH HER CENTENNIAL ON THE HORIZON, Betye Saar formed a scholarly committee charged with “preserving, interpreting, and advancing” her artistic legacy, stewarding her vast body of work, and supporting access to her extensive archive for future generations. The Betye Saar Legacy Group includes nine international curators whose longstanding engagement with the artist has yielded exhibitions, publications, and expert insight into her practice and process.

By Maxwell Rabb 

Betye Saar, known for her assemblages confronting histories of racism, has announced a new initiative to safeguard her legacy. The 99-year-old artist, in partnership with her longtime gallery Roberts Projects, has launched the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to stewarding her contributions to contemporary art history.

A newly established curatorial group—initiated by Betye Saar in collaboration with Roberts Projects—will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to preserving, interpreting and advancing Saar’s profound artistic legacy. Working closely with the artist, her studio and her longtime gallery, the Betye Saar Legacy Group will provide expert guidance on Saar’s decades-long practice and her impact on contemporary art history.

by Alex Greenberger

In February, nine curators received handwritten letters from the artist Betye Saar, who tomorrow turns 99. A legendary artist known for her assemblages attesting to histories of racism and survival in the face of it, Saar thanked the curators for their engagement with her work, then asked if they would help her look forward by helping create a “resource for future generations—curators, researchers, writers, and art historians—helping them connect with the heart of my practice.”

A newly established curatorial group—initiated by Betye Saar in collaboration with Roberts Projects—will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to preserving, interpreting and advancing Saar’s profound artistic legacy. Working closely with the artist, her studio and her longtime gallery, the Betye Saar Legacy Group will provide expert guidance on Saar’s decades-long practice and her impact on contemporary art history.

In 1967, brothers and artists Alonzo and Dale Brockman Davis opened the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles, likely the city’s first Black-owned and operated art gallery. Motivated by the cultural renaissance occurring in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the brothers built a crucial space for emerging artists of color. Act on It! Artists, Community, and the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles brings together dozens of works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection, showcasing the range of experimental approaches to painting, printmaking, and sculpture featured at Brockman.

By Ariana Marsh

One of the most celebrated artists in the medium of assemblage, Betye Saar was born in Los Angeles, where she studied in design. In 1967, she visited an exhibition by found objects sculptor Joseph Cornell, which radically impacted her artistic trajectory. She began lining assemblage boxes with her own prints and drawings, and filling them with found objects, creating pieces that addressed race and current events.

Betye Saar has been honored as a recipient of the Art Basel Award Medal. The Art Basel Awards are the first global honors dedicated to recognizing and advancing excellence across the contemporary art world — celebrating visionaries spanning the industry whose work is shaping the next generation of cutting-edge artistry. Path-breaking artists, cross-disciplinary creators in fashion, design, music, and performance; curators; institutions; patrons and foundations; writers and journalists; and the specialists behind the scenes, from studio managers to fabricators, are honored in Art Basel’s debut year of its landmark annual award cycle.

During the 1950s and 1960s, Altadena was home to a burgeoning Black community and was hailed as the epicenter of Black arts activity in Los Angeles County. Though this designation arguably shifted to the South Central neighborhood of Watts in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, Altadena continued to develop as a vibrant and creative haven with a distinctive Black cultural imprint. Since then, Altadena and the adjacent city of Pasadena have served as home to an extraordinary array of Black artists, educators, musicians, intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and activists.

By Jen Torwudzo-Stroh

“Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica” has generated substantial buzz throughout Chicago since its opening at the Art Institute of Chicago late last year. Though the exhibition’s exploration of the Afro-diasporic solidarity movement has ended, its themes continue to reverberate at the Neubauer Collegium’s “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” which dives into the realization of Pan-Africanism through an oft-overlooked facet of Saar’s work.

In 1996, artist and philanthropist Susan Unterberg founded the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) award, making a simple, yet radical commitment to redress the lack of institutional support for women visual artists over the age of 40. Showcasing work by a selection of awardees from AWAW’s first 25 years (1996 through 2020), this exhibition explores several themes surrounding anonymity and, ultimately, celebrates the transformative impact women artists have made on contemporary art since the award’s founding.

By Sam Lubell

Before the Eaton fire raced across Altadena, destroying more than 9,000 of its buildings, many, even in nearby Los Angeles, barely knew of the place’s existence. This sleepy 42,000-person hamlet hugging the glowing foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains is not part of that city but an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County, and just far enough off the beaten track to blissfully avoid notice.

Interview by Christophe Cherix

The Los Angeles fires brought back to my mind a conversation with Betye Saar about some of the very first etchings she made at home, right out of college. These prints often show charred vegetation rendered in beautiful color overlays, making the burnt wilderness glow in extraordinary shades of ochre and orange. Betye explained at the time that the house she had moved to, in 1962, was located in a canyon that had been devastated by fires three years earlier. When I heard she was safe back home, after having been evacuated for a few days this January, I asked Betye if she would tell us more about these early etchings, which in my mind had always been more about healing and resilience than destruction.

The exhibition offers the first sustained look at a pivotal moment in Betye Saar’s career, when a visit to Chicago’s Field Museum in 1974 transformed the way she conceived of herself as an artist. A display of more than 60 objects—including a ceremonial robe from Cameroon, costumes and jewelry designed by Saar, drawings, photos, archival materials, and more—casts new light on the way Saar’s early career in costume design informed her pioneering work in assemblage and installation. Let’s Get It On is presented as part of a series of exhibitions and events linked to Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, a multi-year research project at the Neubauer Collegium that is exploring the connections between Pan-African politics and culture.

By Emily Steer

The stars reflect our lives back to us. For millennia, they have been used to locate humans’ position on the land; interpret our narratives; and communicate a world of feeling beyond the physical realm. For contemporary artists, stars are often used to bridge the gap between the scientific and the creative, the rational and the intangible. Their artworks reflect upon traditions of mapping and craftsmanship, creating glittering cosmos in rich textiles or unconventional materials. 

By Journey Streams

In the foyer of the Met’s second-floor gallery, Cleopatra’s Chair sits empty, beckoning. This throne, constructed by legendary sculptor Barbara Chase-Riboud, is a remnant of a sustained revelation. In 1957, at only 18 years old, the American artist visited Egypt and experienced an awakening, this first encounter with artworks beyond the European canon influencing her practice for decades. She recalled of the experience: “For someone exposed only to the Greco-Roman tradition, it was a revelation. I suddenly saw how insular the Western World was vis-a-vis the nonwhite, non-Christian world. The blast of Egyptian culture was irresistible. The sheer magnificence of it. The elegance and perfection, the timelessness, the depth. After that, Greek and Roman Art looked like pastry to me.” She completed Cleopatra’s Chair in 1994 (five years before her own groundbreaking solo exhibition at the Met).

A new commission from legendary artist Betye Saar entitled Seeking Secrets of Destiny was installed yesterday at the Legacy Gallery inside the expanded Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

“We are thrilled to have a newly commissioned piece from the legendary Betye Saar at the Legacy Museum gallery,” EJI director Bryan Stevenson said. “Ms. Saar’s lifetime of work on memory and history makes her latest piece perfect for our collection which uses art to reinforce learning about the legacy of slavery. We are also excited that her piece will be positioned next to a work from her talented daughter, Alison Saar.”

In conjunction with Betye Saar’s Mojotech exhibition for Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, Roberts Projects will hold a panel discussion on the intersections between gender, art and technology that have emerged over the last five decades. The title Dear Genius is taken from a letter sent to Betye Saar by her friend, Dr. Helen Anderson, when Mojotech opened at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in 1987.

Panelists are Nancy Baker Cahill, Sarah Rosalena and Mindy Seu, with Jori Finkel as moderator.

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture examines the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States. The exhibition brings together 82 sculptures created between 1792 and 2023 and ranging in size from palm-sized coins to monumental statues created from diverse media such as bronze, marble, shoes, paper, and hair. Made by 70 different artists, these sculptures are displayed to allow for juxtapositions of historical and contemporary works that invite dialogue and reflection on notions of power and identity. American sculpture in its many forms also has served as an expression of resistance, liberation, and a vital means for reclaiming identity.

By Armand Limnander

In honor of the 2024 US Elections, Betye Saar has created a poster featuring a drawing by Saar, made in 1971.

Eight years ago, as the United States faced an unprecedented presidential election, we asked a group of artists to create the political posters they’d like to see. Four years after that, as Black Lives Matter protests roiled the country, artists of color shared with us their points of view. 

Betye Saar and Suchitra Mattai are some of many participating artists to donate works for auction in support of the Harris Victory Fund. The Artists for Kamala online sale will open on October 1st and conclude on October 8th. The sale will have both an auction component as well as some pieces sold on a fixed price basis. All funds raised will go directly to the Harris Victory Fund. 

The artists in Dream On are hopeful of putting the world to rights in uncertain and frightening times. They are not enticed by doom-mongering in their art. For them, old folklore, legends, rituals and incantations form the starting point for new artworks. New life is breathed into historical customs and stories, which serve as mirrors for current social problems and the depiction of an alternative future. They dare to muse nostalgically and dream about things to come while laughing.

By Lisa Wainwright

When Fred Wilson (b.1954) one-upped Picasso’s canonical Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907; Museum of Modern Art, New York) by mounting a replica of a kifwebe mask onto a life-size reproduction of the painting in Picasso/Whose Rules?, it was an emancipatory tactic aimed at liberating the African object from European Modernism’s historic hold. Over the face of the seated figure, Wilson attached the wooden facsimile with a video running behind its eyes, which showed the artist and two Senegalese friends staring back. The men ask questions in three different languages: ‘whose rules decided what is great?’ and ‘if your modern art is our traditional art, does that make our contemporary art your cliché?’.

By Tara Anne Dalbow

Betye Saar has made art for over six decades, yet in many ways, her work feels more relevant and urgent than ever. Her intricate and inventive collages, assemblages, and installations, dating back to the 1960s, merge the political with the mystical, imbuing historical narrative with personal, ancestral memory. Comprised of salvaged objects as various as washboards, handkerchiefs, African masks, jewelry boxes, and window panes, her constructions interrogate racism, sexism, cultural identity, and national mythology.

By Evan Nicole Brown

The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, ICA Miami presents “Toward the Celestial,” a selection of works from its permanent collection highlighting the museum’s programmatic development, as well as recent commissions and previously unshown works. The exhibition is organized thematically, and journeys from microscopic to macroscopic images in order to explore the dimension of time and orders of scale. The exhibition’s title alludes to Betye Saar’s Celestial Universe (1988) banner, which was featured in the artist’s 2021 survey and has been part of installations of the artist over multiple decades suggesting both imminent presence and the recording of time through alternative ideological structures.

By Shelley Holcomb

There are few names that inspire as much admiration and intellectual curiosity as Betye Saar. A true vanguard in the historic Los Angeles art scene, Saar’s distinguished career as an assemblage artist has consistently pushed boundaries, intertwining history, memory, and emotion to forge a profound connection between her viewers and past generations. In an era where themes of identity are on the tip of everyone’s tongues in the art world, Betye Saar, at the age of 97, is not a newcomer to this discourse; she has, in fact, been setting the stage for us all for decades. 

By Emily Steer

Artists have been fascinated by the night sky and its dazzling cosmos for centuries. From Van Gogh’s trippy The Starry Night (1889) to Théodore Géricault’s eerie, green-tinged After the Deluge (1819) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s geometric Starlight Night (1917), many have attempted to capture the inherent mysteries of the universe as viewed from the ground. Some have taken it a step further, with Jeff Koons launching his mini sculptures to the moon using an un-crewed Odysseus lander this February.

So why are these artists continually drawn towards space? With a solar eclipse just behind us, we explore some of the most exciting contemporary artworks that look to infinity and beyond.

Interviewed by Guy Trebay

"The main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going."

By Olivia McEwan

In "Constructing Whiteness," white walls ingeniously link to the text conceptually, explaining the extent to which the British cotton economy relied on the labor of enslaved people in the Southern United States. Nearby is LA-based artist Betye Saar’s I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), an iron shackled to an ironing board bearing an 18th-century diagram of the British slave ship Brookes, behind which is a cotton sheet bearing the Ku Klux Klan symbol. 

Hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, The Black Doll Symposium is a virtual, interdisciplinary conference convened to celebrate and discuss the exciting and varied topic of black dolls. We are thrilled to invite everyone in the diverse community of collectors, curators, dollmakers, scholars, and advocates of Black dolls to join us for two days of roundtable discussions, film screenings, and audience Q&A sessions.

By Mark Westall 

Referencing the tradition of accumulative sculpture that characterizes artistic conventions, Saar’s mixed-media assemblages emerge from a unique succession of gestures that meaningfully build upon each other. This process of accumulation takes aesthetic objects with profound epistemic weight—such as vintage wooden boxes, found objects and photographs—and thoroughly transforms them into mythical entities compounded by historical time.

By Benjamin Sutton

This year’s edition of PST Art, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s recurring programme of exhibitions, events and scholarship, launches it's third edition on 15 September and looks at the intersections of art and science. While the entire lineup of gallery exhibitions that will be part of the PST Art programme has yet to be revealed, shows that are in store include Betye Saar exhibiting her large-scale, cyberpunk altar installation Mojotech (1987) at Roberts Projects, among other exhibitions at many of the city’s foremost galleries.

In what is sure to be a highlight of Frieze Los Angeles this year, Eileen Harris Norton will debut her book All These Liberations in a panel discussion about the dramatic rise of the city’s contemporary art scene in recent decades, as well as the collector and philanthropist’s role as an indefatigable champion of artists of color, particularly women. The scholarly tome—edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge, a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM), who will join the discussion along with artist Alison Saar—places Harris Norton at the heart of a burgeoning milieu of marginalized voices starting in the 1980s and traces the social and civic purpose with which she has approached collecting. That is to say, with boundless curiosity and compassion.

LA-based Roberts Projects will exhibit works by artists that interpret and/or subvert the idea of “oasis” from a range of perspectives. A major highlight of the booth is Betye Saar’s neon work Oasis, which debuted at MOCA Los Angeles in 1984. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that transcendent solo exhibition of room-sized installations, which offered profound insight into tradition, spirituality and African American identity. 

Betye Saar is featured in Entangled Pasts: 1768 – Now at The Royal Academy of Art. Entangled Pasts explores themes of migration, exchange, artistic traditions, identity and belonging, creating connections across time which explore questions of power, representation and history. 

By Mara Veitch

As a child, Betye Saar witnessed the construction of the Watts Towers from broken glass, rusty tools, and seashells, and determined that history is best represented in the detritus of real people’s lives. Though she’s sworn off of deadlines, Saar has one more museum show in the works, Drifting Toward Twilight, now on view at The Huntington in Saar’s native Los Angeles.

Betye Saar's Under The Silver Moon is featured on Flaunt Magazine's 25th anniversary cover. When asked where was the most magical moon she's ever observed, Saar responded:

"Up at Yonderosa, my daughter’s desert ranch, there are many magical moons. The new moon that looks just like a sliver of a fingernail. Or the full moon that casts a shadow of the Joshua Trees almost like a flashlight."

Groove surveys over five hundred years of intaglio prints drawn from the extensive collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. The intaglio medium comprises engravings, etchings, dry point, aquatint, and mezzotint, all of which involve the use of a copper or zinc plate that is incised, inked, and printed. These materials and techniques have remained more or less the same since the fifteenth century. The exhibit includes examples of Renaissance engraving, through contemporary etchings.

By Stephanie Seidel

Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar. Through ritual acts, she assembles syncretic spaces that incorporate spiritual, autobiographical and politically charged elements foraged from flea markets and the annals of history. 

In its own room in the Huntington Library’s American art galleries is a new commission (and acquisition) by longtime LA-based artist Betye Saar. At the center of this blue-lit gallery is a 17-foot vintage wood canoe that Saar had had in her collection for a number of years. Where is this boat going? Saar has left it intentionally open ended, but in the room there is a palpable sense of hope—of a new beginning just on the horizon. 

By Hilton Als

Betye Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women. In her work, that history is often told through pop-culture artifacts, which, in Saar’s hands, take on a witty poetic resonance—an aura—that they wouldn’t otherwise have. Her layered assemblages, which sometimes resemble the interior of a hope chest, are also filled with inquiry: into the nature of mythology, and specifically how and why we mythologize the Black woman.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work “Drifting Toward Twilight”—commissioned by The Huntington—is a site-specific installation that features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s grounds.

A short documentary—produced by The Huntington and directed by Kyle Provencio Reingold, program director of Ghetto Film School LA—is presented within the exhibition, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, at The Huntington. The film features footage of the work in progress in Saar’s studio, documenting her process of selecting natural materials in partnership with The Huntington’s Botanical curators.

Betye Saar is included in Cooking, Cleaning, Caring: Care Work in the Arts Since 1960 at The Josef Albers Museum. Videos, photographs, installations and paintings by international artists that have brought together care work in art since 1960 deal with the social, economic and political meanings as well as the visibility of work that is mostly carried out by women.

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work Drifting Toward Twilight—commissioned by The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—will go on view November 11, 2023, in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.

Featuring more than 100 works drawn primarily from the permanent collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the exhibition spans more than two centuries and includes nineteenth-century studio photography; portraits from the Harlem Renaissance; images from the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter eras; pictures of Black celebrities and political figures; and artists’ self-portraits.

Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s revisits the decades leading up to the founding of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1979 and the opening of MOCA’s Grand Avenue building in 1986.

While it originated in New York in the 1960s with Black literary activist Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement quickly gained traction in Southern California in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Drawing on new mediums flourishing on the West Coast, the Black Arts Movement as it manifested there put the focus on community uplift and radical change.

Illuminating concepts of identity, race, gender, and memory, Colliding Visions: Contemporary California Collage features 25 works by five Southern California artists – Chelle Barbour, Genevieve Gaignard, Patricia Jessup-Woodlin, Betye Saar, and Brenna Youngblood – whose unique viewpoints have been assembled as a visual conversation between the museum walls.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today that it has commissioned artist Betye Saar to create a large-scale, immersive installation for the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Provisionally titled Drifting Toward Twilight, the site-specific work will feature a 17-foot-long wooden canoe that incorporates found objects, paint, neon, natural materials, and plant matter harvested by Saar from the Huntington grounds.  

By Ben Luke

Richly produced book documents how the nonagenarian artist’s work has been informed by her decades of travel. 

“My secret heart seeks the dusty, musty, forgotten corners./It constantly haunts, hunts, collects, gathers objects, images, feelings.” In her 1993 poem My Secret Heart, Betye Saar—whose sculptures, using diverse cultural imagery to reflect on injustice and African American life, form one of the most influential bodies of work in recent American art—tells us about the processes of witnessing, remembering and collecting at the heart of her work. Often, she draws on the experience of travel.

By Catherine G. Wagley

Acclaimed artist Betye Saar brings her “Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 21. The 96-year-old artist is credited with “redefining Black consciousness in art.”

The poetic installations by Betye Saar (b. 1926) entice us to contemplate and dream, yet their origins are of a quite different nature. Through her installations, objects and drawings, the American artist reflects on Black identity, the history of racism in the United States and the permeating discrimination in western society.

Celebrated contemporary artist and leading figure of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, Betye Saar (b. 1926, United States) is a traveler, collector, and storyteller. Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer explores Saar’s trips to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, highlighting works influenced by her many trips and her engagement with global histories of travel.

By Carly Pippin

A Buddhist chant in an Indonesian temple. A bustling Moroccan marketplace. A Haitian Vodou ceremony.

In the 1970s, cultural encounters like these launched artist Betye Saar into a nearly six-decade love affair with travel. Now 96 years old, Saar has visited more than 31 countries, documenting her experiences along the way in vividly colored travel sketchbooks combining hand-drawn observations with knickknacks, ephemera, and found items collected from her destinations.

Betye Saar will sign copies of her latest catalogue Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues at Roberts Projects' new gallery location.

Published by Roberts Projects, Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

Special member-only screening of the documentary Betye Saar: Ready to be a Warrior, chronicling the life and work of the 96-year-old artist who, in her own words, is “an ordinary woman who does extraordinary things.” Diving into the decades-long evolution of her artistic language and exploration of race, gender, and social justice, the film pulls together interviews with friends, family, curators, gallerists, and fellow artists, as well as coverage of the 2019 solo exhibition Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window at MoMA.

An investigation into Betye Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

Craft in America is the Peabody Award-winning series exploring America’s creative spirit through the language and traditions of the handmade. Two episodes entitled INSPIRATION reveal the magic and influence of craft. Featuring: Simon Rodia and Watts Towers; three generations of the Saar family: Alison Saar, Betye Saar, and Maddy Leeser; Hmong artists Suzanne Thao, Tousue Vang, Chef Yia Vang, and Mandora Young; textile artist Mary Little; weaver Diedrick Brackens; and potter Ayumi Horie.

Revisiting 5+1 is a reflection on the historic 1969 Stony Brook University exhibition and features work by the original six artists, all of whom were Black men, with an addition of six Black women artists, all trailblazers at a time when their work in abstraction was challenged by both the mainstream art world and Black art institutions. 

Joan Didion: What She Means is an exhibition as portrait, a narration of the life of one artist by another. Organized by critically acclaimed writer and New Yorker contributor Hilton Als, the exhibition features approximately 50 artists ranging from Betye Saar to Vija Celmins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, and many others. The more than 200 works include painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of the films for which Didion authored screenplays.

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes.

In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of 27 contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, Accra, and Nairobi, In Our Time speaks to the immediacy of this moment on a global scale, as well as the key ideas, narratives, and concerns that artists have been exploring over the past 25 years.

The W. E. B. Du Bois Medal will be awarded to seven honorees “who embody the values of commitment and resolve that are fundamental to the Black experience in America” for their contributions to African and African American culture, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research announced on Wednesday.

Frac Lorraine presents a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998 by Betye Saar. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora.

Promised Land explores different notions of performativity, with special emphasis on how forms of popular culture and ritual converge with the representation of contemporary art. Here performativity is understood as an attempt to formulate various notions of becoming, reinvention, and enhancement of political consciousness as a condition of possibility to overcome the present of any struggle - individual or collective, socio-political or otherwise. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose.

Encompassing a wide range of media, subject matter, sensibilities and approaches, the exhibition will engage with the complexities and contradictions of approaching art through the lens of gender and the idea of “woman artist” as an easily defined or decisive category.

The moon has been bound to life and consciousness since the beginning of humankind. It has served elemental and vital functions such as providing light and measuring time, but it has also influenced the more ethereal and spiritual realms of gods, myths, and magic. This exhibition operates at the crux of a lunar spectrum, between the lure and mystery of the unattainable moon and the eternal quest to conquer the moon in its material form.

Featuring over twenty artists, the special exhibition This Is Not America’s Flag spotlights the myriad ways artists explore the symbol of the flag of the United States of America, underscoring its vast, divergent, and complex meanings.

Titled after Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 work, A Logo for America, This Is Not America’s Flag provides a critical discourse on the symbol’s meaning, the complexity and contradictions of contemporary national identity, and artists as active citizens.

Given the effects of climate change, the global need for clean water, and the specific issues on the East End of Long Island, the topic of water is timely and important. In the exhibition, the theme of water is depicted as a natural element, a scientific subject, an issue of social justice, a historical factor, an ecological question, an aesthetic tradition, a metaphor, and a simple necessity for the existence of life on Earth.

Betye Saar, Mystic Sky with Self-Portrait,1992 is currently on view as part of Creative Communities at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition features prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. The collection spans the history of the workshop, from the early 1970s to today, and includes works by artists who had not yet found representation in the marketplace or museum collections when they arrived at Brandywine—a key constituency of the organization, which seeks to create opportunities for such artists. The exhibition is on view through July 31, 2022 at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums.

ICA Miami welcomes Dr. Zoé Whitley, curator and director of Chisenhale Gallery, London, who will discuss the work of Betye Saar on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition survey “Serious Moonlight.” In conversation with exhibition curator Stephanie Seidel, Whitley will discuss Saar’s installations and the broader context of her work. Whitley most recently exhibited Saar’s works as the co-curator of the award-winning exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” initiated by Tate Modern in London in 2017, which toured throughout the United States until 2020.

A pioneer of second-wave feminist and post­war Black nationalist aesthetics, Betye Saar’s (b. 1926) practice examines African American identity, spirituality, and cross-cultural connectedness. The Trickster (1994), recently acquired by the National Gallery of Art, reflects Saar’s continued introspection, her assertion of the aesthetic and conceptual power of African cultural forms, and the belief that art can be made from anything. This is her first assemblage to enter the National Gallery’s collection where it joins one print and two mixed media works by her.

The iconic artist on infusing her work with the mystical and recreating her mural LA Energy from 1983. Frieze talks to Los Angeles-born artist Betye Saar (b. 1926), presenting with Roberts Projects at Frieze Los Angeles. As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, her practice reflects on African American identity, spirituality and the connectedness between different cultures. Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists.

Featuring historic images, text and archival materials, this publication accompanies the presentation, Betye Saar: L.A. Energy at Frieze Los Angeles, Roberts Projects Booth A12. In July 1983, Betye Saar was commissioned to create a large-scale public art initiative for the City of Los Angeles. Titled L.A. Energy, the joyful mural incorporated several key motifs of Saar’s practice, including collaged elements and the interplay of varying hues to highlight a decidedly West Coast color palette.

The inaugural presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of prints and drawings from 2012 to the present. Over the last decade, through purchases and many generous gifts, the museum has built a robust collection in this medium. This exhibition shows, for the first time, many contemporary prints and drawings in the collection, ranging from the conceptual to the political, the abstract, the gestural, and the poetic.

Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art explores the numerous ways that artists in the United States have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley.

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

As told to Janelle Zara

With a solo show now on at the ICA Miami, the 95-year-old artist reflects on discovering her calling, finding acceptance, and history repeating itself.

‘An early work that stands out in my mind is Record for Hattie [1975], which is about my great-aunt Hattie Parson Keys. When she passed, I inherited her ephemera – notes, letters, dance cards, gloves, handkerchiefs – essentially her life’s mementos. I made the piece so long ago, but I think my process is the same to this day.

ICA Miami presents a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998 by Betye Saar. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora. Saar’s intimately scaled works of the 1960s and 1970s–poignant examinations of race and gender through assemblages of readymades and found objects–became icons of Black feminist art.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between preliminary sketches in small sketchbooks, which Saar has made throughout her career, and finished works. In addition, the show will include approximately a dozen small travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings—relating to leitmotifs seen throughout Saar’s oeuvre—that she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide.

Since 2018, “Atlas” brings together works from Collezione Prada in Torre's six floors, in the form of an exhibition project. The fourth floor is reopening to the public with an unprecedented dialogue between the works by Goshka Macuga and an installation by Betye Saar. Using various juxtapositions and combinations between different artists, "Atlas" represents a possible mapping on the ideas and visions that guided the shaping of the collection and the collaborations with artists that contributed to the activities of Fondazione Prada.

On Sunday, May 30th, 9:30am PST (12:30pm EST) Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig.  The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig acquired the assemblage The Divine Face from 1971 together with the Museum Ludwig for the museum’s collection as part of the prize awarded to Betye Saar. The work will be presented in the museum’s collection from June 1 – September 12, 2021 along with two etchings recently acquired through the “Perlensucher am Museum Ludwig” initiative as well as a collage and an artist’s book.

Created on the occasion of the 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize, Betye Saar's "The Mystic Eyes (Page from 1970 Betye Saar Sketchbook)" 2020 explores the all-seeing eye, a motif that makes it seem as if a benevolent deity is looking down upon us. The ancient symbol is said to lend power and offer protection from harm.

Roberts Projects congratulates Betye Saar who will be inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters on Wednesday, May 19th at 4pm PT (7pm ET.) The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of the country’s 300 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. The election is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

Betye Saar, Her Daughters, and the House That Never Stopped Making Art. The pioneering artist and her three daughters on family, creativity, and why being able to see beauty, even in difficult times, is the true mother of invention.

In the 1970s, Betye Saar (born 1926) emerged as part of the Black Arts Movement and remains best known for her collage and assemblage works that challenge racial stereotypes. Internationally acclaimed, she has received multiple lifetime achievement awards in recent years. Betye Saar’s success continues through her own work and that of her daughters, Lezley Saar (born 1953) and Alison Saar (born 1956), who are also accomplished artists. While they too engage with themes of race, gender, spirituality, and identity, often through narrative, each contributes a unique voice.

Los Angeles–based artist Betye Saar (b. 1926) emerged in the 1960s as a major voice in American art. Part of a generation of artists, many of them African American, who embraced the medium of assemblage, she is known best for incisive collages and sculptures that confront and reclaim racist depictions.

Roberts Projects is delighted to participate in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers. A tightly curated presentation surveying two decades of Betye Saar’s iconic washboard assemblages, Dark Times looks to outline the historic relationships between women’s roles, the divisions of labor, and social class based on race.

Inspired by the late David Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition, “Two Centuries of Black American Art,” the documentary "Black Art: In the Absence of Light" offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today.  Directed by Sam Pollard (Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children) the film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of Driskell’s exhibit on generations of Black artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-Century art world.

By Shannon Lee for Artsy

At the start of 2020, it was impossible to predict that this year would transform the art world as we knew it. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic began to throw entire years of museum, gallery, and biennial exhibitions into the balance, and it may have forever rocked the international art fair circuit. In June, the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the art world and ushered in a long overdue reckoning with the inequity and systemic racism of the art industry. Betye Saar was one of the artists at the forefront of these waves of change.

By Patricia Spears Jones for The New Yorker

My runes are in ruins, little laughter here for my sarcasm
What to do, this chart confuses, conflates moon, which phase
And honey, local or from some exotic shore and what of money
My savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress. Each cold

Join novelist, poet, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Ishmael Reed for a conversation on the empowering role of art as a vehicle for reclaiming elements of African spirituality and culture. Reed has explored this theme in his writing, including in his collaboration with Betye Saar on A Secretary to the Spirits in the 1970s. He is the author of more than thirty titles including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo, as well as non-fiction, plays, and poetry. Six collages from the Morgan collection that Betye Saar made in response to Reed’s poems are currently on view in the exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response.  
 

By Katrice Dustin for The Travel Almanac

Betye Saar’s 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was once credited by activist Angela Davis with marking the beginning of the Black Women’s Movement. The piece—arguably Saar’s most widely known—depicts the mammy caricature of Aunt Jemima reimagined as a freedom fighter: a broom in one hand, a rifle in the other. Fast forward almost fifty years later to the second American Civil Rights Movement, and that same Jim Crow era symbol of systemic racism has finally been set free from the legacy of slavery, with Quaker agreeing in Spring 2020 to discontinue the infamous Aunt Jemima branding on their maple syrup bottles.

By CCH Pounder for Interview Magazine

In the annals of art history, there is a tendency to see the “found object” as a raw material best suited for the cynical, winking gestures of Dada or Pop Art. But at the age of 94, Betye Saar has spent more than a half-century creating radical, poetic, socially textured assemblages by turning mere stuff into profound masterpieces: an ironing board, advertising signs, glass bottles, throwaway items often discovered at flea markets and thrift stores, and collected in her Southern California studio.

By Jessica Lynne for Town & Country

Few artists have had careers as storied as Betye Saar’s. Her recently opened exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response, on view through January 31 at the Morgan Library and Museum, makes that abundantly clear. Saar’s work consistently challenges flattened representations of Blackness, instead articulating an artistic code informed by Saar’s maternal lineage, spiritual symbolisms, and cultural motifs that span the African diaspora.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between Betye Saar’s finished works and the preliminary annotated sketches she has made in small notebooks throughout her career. In addition, the show will include approximately a dozen of Saar’s travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings and collages—often relating to leitmotifs seen across her oeuvre—which she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide. Selections will cover the span of her career, from the late 1960s up through a sculptural installation made specifically for this exhibition.

New York Times T Magazine

In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work into context. This week, we’re looking at a new piece by Betye Saar, known for her legendary work in assemblage, and whose solo show “Call and Response” opens Sept. 12 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Betye Saar’s new work is a collection of found objects, including a sarcophagus from Egypt and wood pieces from a local craft store.

Mojo Rising features Betye Saar’s ongoing mojo focus, and local artists who are inspired by these ideas to create cultural narratives and engaging objects that challenge normalizing tropes, and reveal practices influenced by Saar’s ceaseless commitment to making, sharing, teaching and encouraging artists in Los Angeles and beyond.

Renowned artist Betye Saar defies description and categorization in her mixed media practice, which deals with her travels and personal history, politics, spirituality, and race. Saar is well known for her pioneering collage and assemblage-work in the late 1960s and 70s. In this visit, the groundbreaking artist talks about her sketchbooks and making art from “anything”—true to her assemblage-dominant practice.

Betye Saar is participating in ‘Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present’, conceived and curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Muna El Fituri and the artist Thomas Houseago. Accompanied by a wealth of references and quotes and ranging from the twentieth century through to the present day, the works set up a dialogue that triggers emotional, sensory, visual and tactile connections.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 explores what it meant to be a Black artist in America during two revolutionary decades, from the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement to the early 1980s and the emergence of identity politics. The story unfolds in thematic sections, with a special emphasis on aligned groups in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and another focus on the work of Betye Saar.

By Carolina Miranda for LA Times

I’m starting with a throwback: a rendering by Betye Saar for a mural that occupied a wall on Fifth Street in downtown L.A. from 1983 to 1987. Located near the old headquarters of SoCal Edison at the base of Bunker Hill, the work, titled “L.A. Energy,” is now a point of inspiration for an online exhibition of Saar’s works on galleryplatform.la. Organized by Roberts Projects, the show explores notions of spiritual power.

By Victoria L. Valentine for Culture Type

The exhibition catalogue that accompanies “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” the artist’s showcase of sketchbooks and related artworks, is a real treasure.

Organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the exhibition features sketchbooks dating from 1970 to 2015. The show represents an important milestone for Saar, given it is the first exhibition at a museum in her home state of California to address her entire career and the first anywhere organized around her sketchbooks.

In recent months 93-year-old artist Betye Saar has been cast in the spotlight, with glowing reviews for major shows at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 22, 2019 – April 5, 2020.)  Saar's primary art form is assemblage – sculptures made from found items that she pieces together, often addressing spirituality and black oppression – that turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Correspondent Serna Altschul reports.

Tuesday, January 21, 2020
7pm

What might look like junk to the ordinary person is magically turned into compelling and memorable works by artist Betye Saar. In the exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response, an ironing board takes on the shape of a slave ship, a cocktail tray becomes a tool for meditation and discovery, and a washboard—inscribed with “Extreme Times call for Extreme Heroines” and paired with a mammy figure holding guns—becomes a call to action.

Betye Saar: Taking Care of Business / U.S.A. (Director: Christine Turner) will be included in the 2020 Sundance Film Festival.  At age 93, there's no stopping the legendary artist Betye Saar.  World Premiere.

Works selected across the Indie Episodic, Shorts and Special Events sections of the 2020 Sundance Film Festival were announced on December 10, 2019, underlining Sundance Institute's commitment to showcasing boldindependent storytelling regardless of form, format or length.

Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst on April 21, 2020. This recognition of the artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926 and is still little known in Germany, is highly timely, the jury consisting of Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig; Christophe Cherix, Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and the board members of the association decided. For more than fifty years, Betye Saar has created assemblages from a wide variety of found objects, which she combines with drawing, prints, painting, and photography.

After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as printmaker.

In 1969, Betye Saar made an artwork that would prove pivotal in her career. Taking an old window frame, she filled its 10 sections with a constellation of images. Across the top three panels, she placed colorful printed moons and stars, evoking the night sky. In each of the six squares that follow she set symbolic figures, including an eagle bearing a shield with the word “love,” a map of a human head according to the pseudoscience phrenology, and a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Below these, in the bottom half of the window, Ms. Saar painted the silhouette of a black girl, her eyes made from lenticular lenses and her hands — marked with astrological signs — pressed against the glass.

In size, “Betye Saar: Call and Response” is a modest show. Just 18 sculptures and collages, plus a selection of sketches, are tucked into a single small gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Resnick Pavilion.  The focus is on objects made in the last 25 years of a prolific career that was launched six decades ago.

Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between preliminary sketches in small sketchbooks, which Saar has made throughout her career, and finished works.

At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women’s revolution says she’s waited long enough.

On Saturday, November 2, 2019, The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) will honor artist Betye Saar and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.

Betye Saar, who turns 93 in July, remains both an evolving and an emerging artist. She professes to want to work less hard, “to sit and look at the sky, or watch my garden grow, but still I have ideas.” Though her prints, assemblages, and installations have been exhibited steadily since the ’60s, attention to her work has burgeoned in the past decade, among artists of younger generations and curators internationally.

The benefit event recognizes artists who have made significant contributions to the canon of art history.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce Betye Saar’s participation in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 at The Broad, Los Angeles. The exhibition shines light on a broad spectrum of Black artistic practice from 1963 to 1983, one of the most politically, socially, and aesthetically revolutionary periods in American history.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the Getty Research Institute (GRI) has acquired the archive of Betye Saar (American, b. 1926) as part of GRI’s new African American Art History Initiative.

Established in 1991, the award recognizes individual sculptors who have made exemplary contributions to the field.

The Craft & Folk Art Museum (CAFAM) presents Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean, a solo presentation of the seminal contemporary artist’s washboard assemblage sculptures, which she began in the late 1990s and continues to make to this day. Born in 1926, Saar is a prolific artist and iconic figure of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, whose complex assemblage sculptures address race, memory, and Black consciousness.

Betye Saar is participating in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85. Focusing on the work of black women artists, the exhibition examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism.

Fondazione Prada presents “Uneasy Dancer”, a comprehensive survey of work by Betye Saar (Los Angeles, 1926). This exhibition, hosted at the Nord Gallery, opens to the public from 15 September 2016 through 8 January 2017.  Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” is the first exhibition of the American artist in Italy, and brings together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and sculpture produced between 1966 and 2016. 

Just three months shy of her 90th birthday, Los Angeles artist Betye Saar gives a tour of her studio and explains what keeps her inspired.

There is a touch of alchemy to Betye Saar’s artwork: transforming the simple and mundane into powerful art. Since the 1960s, her compelling, astute and expressive works reflect on African- American identity, spirituality and the interconnectedness between different cultures. This timely retrospective brings together recent work as well as historical pieces created over her six decade long career.

A Constellation traces connections among twenty-six artists of African descent: eight who emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, and who are represented in the exhibition by works from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, and eighteen younger artists whose works are being shown at the Studio Museum for the first time.