As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, Betye Saar’s 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.
For over six decades, Saar has created assemblage works that explore the social, political, and economic underpinnings of America’s collective memory. She began her career at the age of 35 producing work that dealt with mysticism, nature and family. Saar’s art became political in the 1970’s namely with the assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in 1972. As did many of the women who came to consciousness in the 1960’s, Saar takes on the feminist mantra “the personal is political” as a fundamental principle in her assemblage works. Her appropriation of black collectibles, heirlooms, and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion, and yet given her status as a pioneer of the Assemblage movement, the impact of Saar’s oeuvre on contemporary art has yet to be fully acknowledged or critically assessed. Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach and continues to both actively produce work and inspire countless others.
Betye Saar
Dark Voyage, 2024
Mixed media assemblage
12.5 x 11.5 x 5.5 in (31.8 x 29.2 x 14 cm)
Betye Saar
Tower of Destiny, 2023
Mixed media assemblage on vintage washboards
73 x 8.5 x 2.5 in (185.4 x 21.6 x 6.4 cm)
Betye Saar
Blue Mystic Window w/ Cosmos, 2022
Watercolor and mixed media on paper in found window frame
18 x 24 x 1 in (45.7 x 61 x 2.5 cm)
Betye Saar
Woke Up This Morning, the Blues was in My Bed, 2019
Mixed media assemblage
25.25 x 78 x 43 in (64.1 x 198.1 x 109.2 cm)
Betye Saar
Sunnyland (On the Dark Side), 1998
Mixed media assemblage
33.5 x 16 x 2.5 in (85 x 40.5 x 6.5 cm)
Collection of the Museum Het Domein / De Domijnen, Sittard The Netherlands, with the support of Mondriaan Fonds
Betye Saar
Mojotech, 1987
Mixed media assemblage
76 x 338 x 14 in (193.0 x 858.5 x 35.6 cm)
Betye Saar
Black Girls Window, 1969
Mixed media assemblage
35.75 x 18 x 1.5 in (90.8 x 45.7 x 3.8 cm)
Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York: The Modern Women's Fund and Committee on Painting and Sculpture Funds
Betye Saar
Indigo Mercy, 1975
Mixed media assemblage
42 x 13 x 13 in (106.7 x 33.0 x 33.0 cm)
Collection of the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York; gift of Nzingha Society, Inc.
Betye Saar
Gliding Into Midnight, 2019
Mixed media assemblage tableau
22 x 36 x 138 in (55.9 x 91.4 x 350.5 cm)
Betye Saar
Gris Gris Guardian, 1990-93
Wood, wire, glass, candles, braided rope, stones, nails, oil paint, feathers, beads, steel, bronze, corn husks, and petrified wood
28 x 11 x 7.5 in (71.12 x 27.94 x 19.05 cm)
Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; purchased with funds provided by the Richard Florsheim Art Fund and the Modern and Contemporary Art Council
Betye Saar
Eshu (The Trickster), 1971
Mixed media assemblage
40.25 x 38 x .25 in (102.2 x 96.5 x 0.6 cm)
Collection of the Art Institute of Chicago; Nancy Lauter McDougal and Alfred L. McDougal Fund
Betye Saar
The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972
Mixed media assemblage
11.75 x 8 x 2.75 in (29.8 x 20.3 x 7.0 cm)
Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum; purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Committee for the Acquisition of Afro-American Art)
Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues brings together a selection of new watercolor works on paper, portraits of Saar’s personal collection of Black dolls. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls as seen through Saar’s artistic lens, the works on view distill several intersecting themes, imagery, and objects in Saar’s oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of derogatory imagery.
"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.
The exhibition "Betye Saar: Call and Response" looks at the relationship between found objects, sketches the artist then makes in small sketchbooks--which Betye Saar has made throughout her career--and finished works. In this short video LACMA’s Senior Curator of Modern Art and organizing curator of the exhibition, Carol S. Eliel, shares a few highlights from this rare look into a process that has spanned Saar’s entire career.
At 93, there’s no stopping when it comes to the legendary artist Betye Saar. Produced by LACMA Productions this documentary features the artwork of Betye Saar along with interviews and rare footage from the artist's archives.
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 and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 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.
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. "Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl's Window" is on view at The Museum of Modern Art through January 4, 2020
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.
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.
By Zach Bernsten
Created during Betye Saar’s residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, “Mojotech” is a pioneering achievement in altar assemblage. The sprawling exhibit intertwines ritual objects with circuit boards and computer parts, creating a potent display about the impact of technology on the natural world.
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.
Roberts Projects is pleased to present a tightly-curated selection of works that interpret and subvert the meaning of 'oasis' from a diverse range of perspectives. Works by contemporary artists including Amoako Boafo, Daniel Crews-Chubb, Suchitra Mattai, Collins Obijiaku, Ed Templeton, and Brenna Youngblood conjure sensations of relief that nurture the human spirit while contemplating the hardships from which we seek refuge. Major hishlight sof the booth include Betye Saar's Oasis and Suchitra Mattai's between oceans.
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”—recently 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. The commission is personal for Saar, who has fond memories of visiting The Huntington as a child and of the trees and landscape in her north Pasadena neighborhood.
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.
“Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries” is an extensive exhibition curated by Nicholas Cullinan that investigates the histories and semantics of folding screens by tracing trajectories of cross-pollination between East and West, processes of hybridization between different art forms and functions, collaborative relationships between designers and artists, and the emergence of newly created works.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
By Isabella Miller
At Roberts Projects, visitors leave offerings—a small Buddha, an origami dollar bill, an unopened bandaid—at the base of Mojotech (1987), an otherworldly altarpiece by Betye Saar. Recalling the form of a Catholic polyptych, the seven-panel installation forms an abstracted landscape constructed from fragmented mirrors, broken circuitry, obsolete technologies, and other materials that echo the use-what-you-can ethos of both the Great Depression era in which Saar was raised and post-apocalyptic science fiction worlds. Created during a residency at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Mojotech reflects the cybernetic and techno-utopian optimism of the 1980s, when human-machine integration was envisioned as a solution to humanity’s challenges and computers were revered as almost divine.
By Lauren Guilford
Mojotech is Betye Saar’s abbreviation for the “magic of technology” and the title of her large-scale installation from 1987 on view at Roberts Projects. Standing at the horizon of Saar’s trailing altarpiece, I’m reminded of the language of trees and how they communicate through ancient underground fungal networks. Around the installation’s edge, copper wire tails appear to worm out of (or into) the wall. Saar’s work functions like a wormhole—a tunnel connecting points separated in space and time—understanding technology as a constellation, or assemblage, with world-building potential, relating its networked nature to ancestral knowledge not unlike the language of trees.
By Donna Torrence
When we think of Black fine artists, we often think of men like, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Jacob Lawrence, Gordon Parks, Romare Beardon. Men who are no longer with us, but have left a lasting legacy. But what about the many Black women creating art reflective of today’s Black experience from her perspective? We have rounded up a few who are out here creating, evolving and showing their work in cities near you.
By Collin Colaizzi
To make a splash in the art world is one thing; to sustain that momentum over a number of years—decades, even—is quite another. “For years, decades really, I've always had a sketchbook or little pad of paper with me. I get ideas or see things that I like and want to remember. Pen and paper are very old school these days. When I travel, I bring an art kit with watercolor paints, brushes, and paper. Being observant and open to new ideas and influences is important for being an artist,” offers Betye Saar.
By Elaine YJ Zheng
Even at 97, Betye Saar's legacy endures. Saar was a central figure of the Black Arts Movement in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s, who used sculpture, print, and assemblage to contest racial stereotypes of Black Americans and their historical origins. Saar's work was political as it was personal. Assembled from objects gathered from travels and flea markets—vintage wooden boxes, birdcages, washboards, photographs—they spoke to sentiments characterising the Black female experience: rage, confinement, and faith.
By Mark Westall
Occupying the intersections of historic narrative and ancestral memory, factitive ritual and metaphysical truth, this exhibition is testament to Saar’s enduring legacy as a pioneer of Assemblage art and an American cultural icon. 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 Hesper Cane
Aligning with Frieze LA, Roberts Projects will concurrently showcase the work of two artists, Betye Saar and Marilyn Nance, spotlighting an unexpected intersection where their careers meet. Titled Marilyn Nance: The Women of FESTAC'77, the show reconsiders the momentous occasion when Nance was selected as the official photographer for the United States at the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC '77). Betye Saar was among the participating artists selected to represent the US at FESTAC'77, connecting the two oeuvres. Further exploring this bond, Roberts Projects is simultaneously organizing the show Betye Saar: New Work.
Occupying the intersections of historic narrative and ancestral memory, factitive ritual and metaphysical truth, this exhibition is testament to Saar’s enduring legacy as a pioneer of Assemblage art and an American cultural icon. 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.
The exhibition offers a curated selection from Nance’s vast catalogue of photographs and archival materials that revisits the memory of the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC’77) from the perspectives of women artists in the American contingent. Objects from fellow participant Betye Saar’s archives are also on display, including her sketches, datebook, personal photos, official FESTAC’77 participation documents and ephemera. Saar’s exhibition is testament to her legacy as a pioneer of Assemblage and an American cultural icon. 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
Roberts Projects will exhibit works by artists that interpret and/or subvert the idea of “oasis” from a range of perspectives: calm to nurture the human spirit and the hardships from which we seek refuge. 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. Saar will also debut new works in an installation designed by the artist for Roberts Projects, which will be on view for the duration of the fair. Occupying the intersections of historical narrative and ancestral memory, ritual and metaphysical truth, the presentation is testament to Saar’s enduring legacy as a pioneer of assemblage art, and as a cultural icon.
L.A. icon and artist Betye Saar has just unveiled a brand-new artwork that takes over an entire room at the Scott Galleries at the Huntington. The centerpiece is a wooden canoe, carrying various “passengers,” including birdcages, antlers and children’s chairs. The walls are bathed in blue and the floor is scattered with plants that Saar foraged from the surrounding gardens. Saar has invited us to drift and dream.
By Annie Bush
Los Angeles-born Betye Saar, paradigmatic American storyteller and assemblage artist, is widely revered for her work as a pioneer of the Black Arts movement of the seventies and for her ability to braid motifs of liberation with those of personal loss and love, using a fascination with the American occult and a keen eye for symbolism in the mundane. At the age of 97, Saar is still actively working: this month, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight will go on display at the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, to be displayed for two years before becoming a permanent part of The Huntington’s American art collection.
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.
By May Ruiz
A newly commissioned, site-specific installation by renowned Pasadena artist Betye Saar opened to the public on Saturday, Nov. 11, 2023 at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Called Drifting Toward Twilight, it will be on view for two years at the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art, after which it will become part of the institution’s American art collection.
By Christine N. Ziemba
View a new site-specific installation by renowned artist Betye Saar, commissioned by The Huntington. The large-scale piece, Drifting Toward Twilight, is located in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art and includes a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s 207-acre grounds.
By Victoria L. Valentine
Drifting Toward Twilight is an immersive, room-sized installation commissioned by The Huntington. The walls arenocean blue and feature phases of the moon and a poem by Betye Saar. At is center is a site-specific work, a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe Saar has made her own with wood chairs evoking "passengers," antlers in birdcages, and other found objects, along with natural materials from the museum's more than 200-acre grounds.
By Steven Vargas
Get an intimate look into Betye Saar’s upbringing and career with Drifting Toward Twilight, an immersive exhibition at the Huntington in San Marino. The commissioned centerpiece of the exhibition is personal to Saar as someone who grew up visiting the Huntington with her mother and aunt. Saar—a trailblazer of the Assemblage movement—acknowledges the influence that nature has had in her career, immersing viewers even further into the outdoors with emulated twilight, mesmerizing blue hues and a canoe.
By Matt Stromberg
The centerpiece of Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight is a site-specific installation composed of a 17-foot-long wooden canoe adorned with birdcages, antlers, plants, and other natural elements gathered from the Huntington’s gardens. The sculpture is set within a “cocoon-like” gallery with painted blue walls and lighting effects echoing the natural progression of day to night.
By Murray Whyte
‘Heart of a Wanderer’ has a softer edge than the explicitly political work that made Saar’s name, but it has an edge all the same.
At the core of “Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” at the Gardner Museum stands a revelatory work: “Globe Trotter,” 2007, a rickety bamboo table topped with a delicate birdcage; an old globe, yellowed and obsolete, is tucked below. Inside the cage, a doll knit of ragged swatches of cloth perches next to a flaking mirror. Whatever the voyage, it seems anything but a tourist sojourn; the piece clouds the sunny implications of its title with ambiguity and dread. It makes a powerful point: Travel by choice is privilege, and for much of human history, mass movements of humanity have rarely been free.
Further inside the maze, Boafo appears again on the wall at Roberts Projects, his pink multitone painting Umbrella, 2021, lending its warmth to the larger group display. The Los Angeles gallery is also exhibiting Blue Mystic Window w/ Moons & Stars, a new mixed-media work by the 96-year-old artist Betye Saar that depicts a window view of a constellation-adorned night sky.
By Elizabeth Fazzare
At 96, Betye Saar practices self-care through creativity, “whether it’s making a nice breakfast or making art,” she says. The Los Angeles–born artist is lauded for her assemblage technique, which borrows from her fascination with the metaphysical and the magical and reflects on African American identity and global cultures.
“Serious Moonlight” is a cerebral, deeply felt exhibition imaginatively curated by Stephanie Seidel. It is the first focused presentation of Betye Saar’s installations—made primarily in the 1980s and ’90s—since Lowery Stokes Sims’s staging of this work in “Resurrection: Site Installations, 1977 to 1987” at the Visual Arts Center at California State University, Fullerton, in 1988. The show here also marks the first East Coast presentation of this less-examined body of work. This revelatory period is full of secrets, offering new insights into Saar’s complexity and impact as an artist—expanding the story of her personal and political practice while demonstrating her ongoing importance to new generations of artists.
The third edition of Frieze Los Angeles opened to VIPs on Thursday. With over 100 galleries taking part, we asked Blum & Poe, Goodman Gallery, Pilar Corrias, Roberts Projects, and Sean Kelly to share what they're showing and why.
By Folasade Ologundudu
One of the most anticipated presentations at this year’s Frieze L.A. is a recreation of Saar’s monumental 1983 mural L.A. Energy, organized by Roberts Projects. Originally commissioned by the city 39 years ago, the joyous work featured a vibrant West Coast color palette and Saar’s signature collaged elements. The mural was torn down in 1987 to make way for new construction. “After two years of pandemic-related shutdowns, the energy of Los Angeles has returned,” Saar told Artsy. “I felt the perfect opportunity to re-create my 1983 mural.”
By Helen Stoilas
The 95-year-old artist Betye Saar will be on site at Frieze Los Angeles this week to hand paint a re-creation of her 1983 public mural L.A. Energy on the stand of Roberts Projects. Originally painted on a retaining wall on Fifth Street between Grand and Flower streets—near the Art Deco headquarters of the Southern California Edison electric company—the dynamic mural was destroyed just four years later during redevelopment of the Bunker Hill neighbourhood.
A Culver City-based gallery, Roberts Projects will bring together new and recent works by artists dealing with themes of diversity and inclusivity. All of the artists presented are either LA-based or their work has been influenced by the city. The gallery booth will include paintings by Brenna Youngblood, Amoako Boafo, and Kehinde Wiley, as well as works on paper by Dominic Chambers. The gallery will also present a significant project by Betye Saar, Betye Saar: L.A. Energy (1983/2022), that aims to highlight the incredible symbolism of the artist’s monumental 1983 Los Angeles public mural.
Roberts Projects will bring together generations of artists from the city of Los Angeles. Kehinde Wiley, who is currently on show at LA’s Huntington Museum, presents new painting, alongside Betye Saar, renowned for her contribution to Black Arts Movement in the 1970s.
Roberts Projects is showing a new site-specific installation by Betye Saar that reinterprets her 1983 city-commissioned mural L.A. Energy, which the 95-year-old artist will be creating in person, on-site. "We're not worried about walk-in sales, more about having the best booth," said gallery co-owner Bennett Roberts, who is also showing works by Amoako Boafo, Brenna Youngblood, and Kehinde Wiley.
For the second time in just over two months, 95-year-old Betye Saar is set to be the star of a major fair. Fresh from opening her acclaimed ICA Miami retrospective during Art Basel Miami Beach, Saar has been onsite at Frieze LA recreating her 1983 mural L.A. Energy. The Culver City-based gallery Roberts Projects considers it the highlight of their diversity- and inclusivity-themed booth, which will also feature paintings by Amoako Boafo and Kehinde Wiley.
What to see in L.A. at the Frieze, Felix and Spring/Break Art Fairs, plus must-catch gallery and museum shows.
Highlights from L.A. galleries showing at Frieze include a new iteration of Betye Saar’s 1981 Los Angeles public mural, L.A. Energy, shown by Roberts Projects; and a solo presentation of works by Samuel Levi Jones at Vielmetter Los Angeles‘ booth.
By Gabriella Angeleti
Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (ICA Miami) explores an understudied period of the artist’s career. In the 1980s and 90s, the celebrated artist—who is best-known for her sculptural assemblages centred on themes of spirituality, cosmology and the African diaspora—made a series of installations that dimensionally and philosophically expanded on the “altars” she began creating in the 1970s. The mixed-media sculptures were inspired by her research into animist religious practices during trips to Nigeria, Haiti and Mexico.
As is often the case at art fairs, where artworks vie for the attention of eyes stimulated by so much overabundance, there is easily legible art aplenty at Art Basel Miami Beach. So it comes as a bit of respite to see standout shows that reward contemplation of the kind encouraged at the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami. Betye Saar and Hugh Hayden, two artists with shows now on view, could not be more different—they are separated by multiple generations, and they work in seemingly different modes. But their work is bound by a desire to develop private mythologies while using ready-made objects. Taken together, the two shows seem to ponder how items we encounter every day can be lent new meaning.
The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) announces the upcoming exhibition Betye Saar: Still Tickin’—the artist’s first solo show in an American museum in five years.
This retrospective, on view January 30 through May 1, includes multimedia collages, assemblages, sculpture, works on paper as well as individually reconceived installations and brings together work representing her six-decade career. It is divided into three sections that explore the development of specific themes across time in her work: nostalgia and memory; mysticism and ritual; the political and racial. Surveying both historical and contemporary work alike, the exhibition continues the discourse of Saar’s unwavering charge to create works of intense social and political content.
Unless you have been living under an art-deprived rock, you probably recognize the striking work of Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo. The painter is on a still-ascending meteoric rise and undoubtedly one of the buzziest artists of the moment. In the span of a mere few years, Boafo transitioned from struggling to sell his works in Accra, Ghana, for $100 each to hosting supermodel-and starlet-studded dinners at Faena Hotel during Art Basel Miami Beach and having his work in the collections of major museums including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Rubell Museum in Miami and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
In her latest exhibition, Black Doll Blues at Roberts Projects, Saar turns to the familiar yet under-appreciated medium of watercolor. The show features a series of seven watercolor portraits of dolls from the artist’s personal collection. The title of the show belies the work’s celebration of the comforting, enduring magic of play, but it also reveals America’s lingering discomfort with racist objects and their origins. Evidence of this is found among the justifications people use to explain their enduring presence. Racist memorabilia is collected and inherited by some as nostalgic keepsakes, while others use these objects as tools to teach our complicated, violent history. Despite the range of rationales used by collectors to justify their existence, racist Jim Crow iconography has maintained a stronghold over our perceptions of Blackness, which continue to influence identity to this day.
By Nadra Nittle for The Guardian
When the artist Betye Saar learned the Aunt Jemima brand was removing the mammy-like character that had been a fixture on its pancake mixes since 1889, she uttered two words: “Oh, finally.”
Those familiar with Saar’s most famous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, might have expected a more dramatic reaction. After all, this was a piece of art so revolutionary that the activist and scholar Angela Davis credited it with launching the Black women’s movement. In this 1972 assemblage piece, Saar took the brand’s familiar character and radicalised her – changing her from a racist caricature who delighted in serving her white enslavers to a woman determined to be free.
Now 95, Saar has since collected many a Black doll—including rag dolls, tourist souvenirs, and lucky finds in flea markets. In her latest series of watercolors, Saar has made her treasured dolls the subject. The paintings, executed in flat shapes and a rich palette, were “a way to keep me feeling safe during the lockdown,” she explains. “Essentially, I was playing with my dolls.”
You could say artist Betye Saar's new suite of watercolors started in the 1960s, when the now 95-year-old artist began collecting black dolls in Los Angeles. This lead to a lifelong collecting pursuit that is now playing out in an exhibition at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles called "Betye Saar Black Doll Blues." Here Saar answers out inquiries on the matter.
Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues, on view this fall at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, brings together her decades-long process of addressing underrepresented manifestations of Black America through dolls and assemblage. This particular exhibition will also feature a series of new watercolor works on paper. As the gallery notes, “For over six decades, Saar has created work that explores the social, political, and economic underpinnings of America’s collective memory.” Much of this stems from her works featuring Black dolls from her personal archive. In musing that, “Every object has a story,” she has made prodigious works of subversion and illumination that qualify her as one of the ultimate pioneers of the assemblage movement.
By Ted Loos
It was the pop-up of its day — though in influence it was more of a supernova than a pop.“Sapphire Show: You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” debuted at Gallery 32, a Los Angeles oasis for the work of African American artists. It opened on a holiday — July 4, 1970 — and closed five days later, the penultimate show at the experimental gallery near MacArthur Park. The gallery itself folded soon after.
By Cassie Packard
In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA) made headlines when it deaccessioned seven artworks by prominent white, male 20th-century artists to fund the diversification of its collection, announcing an ambitious plan to funnel money from the sale of the work into a dedicated acquisition fund for contemporary art by underrepresented makers such as women, Black, Indigenous, and self-trained artists.
In recent years, the work of the ninety-four-year-old artist Betye Saar has experienced something of a critical reappraisal, with major retrospectives appearing concurrently at the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2019. When asked why this sudden resurgence in attention might be occurring, she replied: “Because it’s about time! I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.” It’s baffling that she had to wait at all: Saar’s work, especially her Joseph Cornell–inspired assemblages, is without peer.
By Hillel Italie
NEW YORK (AP) — One of the country’s oldest cultural instititutions, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, is undergoing some of its biggest changes in more than a century. For the first time since 1908, the academy is expanding its core membership, from 250 artists in literature, music and art and architecture, to 300 by 2025.
By Maximilíano Durón
When Quaker Oats announced that it would change the name of its Aunt Jemima syrup and pancake mix earlier this week after saying that the brand’s “origins are based on a racial stereotype,” the news was seen as an acknowledgement that the brand’s iconic image had played a role in systemic racism in the United States. But the company’s use of Aunt Jemima has long been the subject of work by Black artists who have created visions of her liberation.
By Sarah Rose Sharp
As protests against state-sanctioned police violence and institutionalized racism continue in cities throughout the US and beyond, major brands have been taking a hard look at their optics — particularly the continued use of logos and branding based in racist iconography or ideology. This week, Quaker Oats — a subsidiary of PepsiCo — announced their decision to retire the name and branding imagery on their line of Aunt Jemima pancake mix and syrup products.
Betye Saar weighed in on the critical change on Instagram, as well as in a statement released through the Los Angeles-based gallery Roberts Projects.
By Sarah Cascone
The 130-year-old Aunt Jemima brand of pancake mix, waffles, and breakfast syrup will be no more, the Quaker Oats company announced on June 17.
The PepsiCo-owned company is retiring the brand and its namesake character, acknowledging that “Aunt Jemima’s origins are based on a racial stereotype,” it said in a statement.
“While work has been done over the years to update the brand in a manner intended to be appropriate and respectful, we realize those changes are not enough,” added Kristin Kroepfl, vice president and chief marketing officer of Quaker Foods North America.
Video by Christine Turner
At 93, there’s no stopping when it comes to the legendary artist Betye Saar. A self-proclaimed “recycler,” Ms. Saar has been creating assemblage art for decades. The objects in her work reflect her very personal visions of nature, spirituality and ideas addressing equality and a new kind of African-American representation. By taking a derogatory caricature like Aunt Jemima and outfitting her with weapons, Ms. Saar transforms her into an image of power and certitude. Learn more about her story, in her own words, in the short documentary above.
By Hettie Judah
From major solo shows by female artists – including Marina Abramović, Yayoi Kusama, Betye Saar and Alice Neel – to explorations of modern masculinity, photographic retrospectives, biennales and triennales, here are our must-see global exhibitions for the year ahead.
Betye Saar: “I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so… It’s all together and it’s just my work,” Betye Saar has said. Now in her nineties, the artist came of age alongside the civil rights movements in the US. Her assemblages evoke magic and supernatural power, but she can also be forthright: in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) she arms the familiar caricature with rifle and grenade.
By Karen Michel
Celebrated African American artist Betye Saar is now in her 90s and still hard at work. She has two major shows dedicated to her distinctive pieces created largely from found objects.
By Lorissa Rinehart
Betye Saar: Call and Response at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
September 22, 2019–April 5, 2020
Curated by Carol S. Eliel
It’s rare that such a small show has such a large impact. But Betye Saar’s limited yet exquisite retrospective has the density and luminosity of a neutron star. Highlighting choice works from throughout her career, Call and Response exemplifies Saar’s ability to reshape the world around her through uniquely configured assemblages. Her notebooks, many on view for the first time, give insight into this important yet all-too-often overlooked artist and her process. While viewers at first might be tempted to wish for a larger selection, and understandably so, it is, in the end, equally if not more gratifying to spend time with the core of Saar’s work that spans the better part of a century.
By Jane Wooldridge, Andres Viglucci, and Siobhan Morrissey
One of the most poignant works in the show is Betye Saar’s canoe filled with hands reaching up from the cobalt interior and hanging above a diagram from the interior of a slave ship from the Middle Passage. Gallerist Bennett Roberts of Roberts Projects (J11) explains it as Saar’s contemplation on her origins as the 93-year-old artist contemplates the inevitable next stage in her journey.
By Ann C. Collins
In 1969, Betye Saar pulled out a discarded window frame she had found on a family vacation and pasted photographs, illustrations, and sections of her own prints behind its panes. The result was Black Girl’s Window (1969), a pivotal work in the artist’s career that blended the mystical imagery Saar was using in her ongoing printmaking practice with political and biographical elements to form a self-portrait assemblage. 50 years later, the work is now on view at the newly re-opened Museum of Modern Art as the centerpiece of Betye Saar: The Legend of Black Girl’s Window. Organized by Christophe Cherix and Esther Adler with Ana Torok and Nectar Knuckles, the exhibition hails the museum’s recent acquisition of more than 40 of the artist’s early works on paper.
By Claire Selvin
In recent years, podcasts have been launched by a number of arts institutions and businesses, with everyone from the Museum of Modern Art to Sean Kelly Gallery getting in on the action. Now the Getty Center in Los Angeles is expanding its efforts in the field, with the debut of its second audio offering: Recording Artists: Radical Women. And a well-known figure is at the helm: the closely watched curator Helen Molesworth, formerly of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. The podcast devotes each of its six episodes to a different woman artist of the 20th-century: Alice Neel, Lee Krasner, Betye Saar, Helen Frankenthaler, Yoko Ono, and Eva Hesse.
By André Wheeler
Soul of a Nation, at San Francisco’s De Young Museum, celebrates artists and activists in the home of the Black Panthers.
Long before the rise of tech corporations, high rents and Lime scooters, the Bay Area was a breeding ground for for black artists and activists. Artists such as Emory Douglas created Soviet-influenced protest art for the Black Panther newspaper; Raymond Saunders strived to highlight the beauty of blackness with his coal-dark backdrops and figures; Cleveland Bellow brought art into the streets with his public murals and billboards.
By Alex Greenberger
Over the past year, Betye Saar has experienced a sudden late-career revival. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York are both devoting solo shows to her work (though neither is a full retrospective—let’s hope that happens soon), and the artist has been profiled by the New York Times and many other national publications. Now, the pioneering 93-year-old Los Angeles–based artist has won another huge accolade.
Betye Saar has been named the winner of the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize. Administered by the Society for Modern Art at the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the institution will soon add a work, or a series of works, by the Los Angeles–based artist to its collection. Saar is known for creating assemblage and collage works that tackle issues of race and politics and draw from a myriad of sources, including shamanism and her own personal history. She will be presented with the award at a ceremony at the museum on April 21, which will mark the opening of an exhibition of her work.
By Rachel Marlowe
“Two children of the same family” was how Alfonso Cuarón described the relationship between the disciplines at the ninth annual Art+Film Gala, presented by Gucci, on Saturday night. The filmmaker was honored alongside artist Betye Saar at the star-studded event (cochaired by Eva Chow and Leonardo DiCaprio), which brought the two worlds together in a way that perhaps only Los Angeles can. After all, where else might you see Billie Eilish and Jared Leto having a tête-à-tête with Naomi Campbell under the glow of Chris Burden’s Urban Light; Greta Gerwig, Laura Dern, and John Legend taking a selfie; or Guillermo del Toro and Nick and Susie Cave watching Anderson .Paak perform?
By Jocelyn Silver
Billie Eilish met Naomi Campbell and just could not keep it together. Relatable content! The two were introduced at the Gucci-sponsored 2019 LACMA Art + Film Gala, a celebrity-studded event held to raise funds for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The gala honored (long-underappreciated) artist Betye Saar and director Alfonso Cuarón. Fellow attendees included Leonardo DiCaprio (a co-host), Laura Dern, Salma Hayek, Greta Gerwig, Keanu Reeves, Ava DuVernay, Tyler the Creator, Jon Hamm, and so many more that just reading the list made our heads swim. But Eilish only had eis (sorry) for Campbell.
By Deborah Vankin
A memorable moment from Saturday night’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art gala: 93-year-old assemblage artist Betye Saar, one of the evening’s two honorees, greeting guests in the museum’s central plaza during cocktails. The woman whom the New Yorker recently called “one of the most significant philosopher-artists of the past century” wore a flowing, sparkly black Gucci gown, her hair tucked into a turban bearing a diamond-encrusted eye pendant that her date this evening, Neil Lane, had designed for the occasion.
“It’s the all-seeing eye, it sees everything,” Saar whispered, leaning forward conspiratorially, bathed in the hazy, ethereal emerald and lavender lights from Robert Irwin’s adjacent “Primal Palm Garden.” “It’s a symbol of wisdom.”
A constellation of stars clad in Gucci, who presented the evening, collided at the ninth annual gala to honor artist Betye Saar and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón.
By Katherine Ormerod
Across fields from sports and comedy to art and fashion, leaders like Alex Morgan, Phoebe Robinson, Betye Saar, and Gabriela Hearst are rewriting the rules of success.
"She who dares wins” is an oft-Instagrammed motivational maxim, but true daring isn’t just about coming out on top. Instead daring can mean fighting the good fight and risking one’s career advancement. Next year will mark the centenary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote, and if we’ve learned anything from the past hundred years, it’s that women will not be silenced. Regardless of the obstacles, we will find work-arounds to achieve our dreams.
By Doreen St. Félix
The four-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar expansion of the Museum of Modern Art is complete. One afternoon during its opening week, a polite crowd queued on Fifty-third Street. Three tourists, hands heavy with shopping bags, fretted over whether to join it. One flagged down a momaemployee and then thumbed in the direction of the premier temple of modernism. “What do they have in there?” the tourist asked. “Modern art,” the employee responded, and, when he was met with blank expressions, he continued, “You know, Jackson Pollock. Andy Warhol.”
By Jillian Steinhauer
A new exhibition concentrates on the artist’s early years, tracking the experiments in printmaking and assemblage that led to her pivotal work “Black Girl’s Window.”
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.
By Matt Stromberg
In the sloping hills of Laurel Canyon, Betye Saar’s studio is filled with raw materials. Instead of paint or clay, however, these are the everyday objects the assemblage artist has acquired over the past 50 years at flea markets and garage sales, all organized neatly by type: clocks, birdcages, starfish, globes, wooden chairs and colored glass bottles. Tacked to a wall is a large diagram of the British slave ship Brookes, in which dozens of black silhouettes are crammed tightly together. It is a haunting image underscoring the brutality of slavery that Saar has included in several works. One table holds only red items, including painted wooden slices of watermelon, a derogatory “mammy” figure, and an afro pick, above which a framed Barack Obama “Hope” poster and a red African mask hang on the wall.
By Mediha DiMartino
Betye Saar, 93, is a Los Angeles-based assemblagist who has received numerous accolades, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1974 and 1984, a fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Fund for the Visual Arts in 1990, and a Distinguished Women in the Arts Award from L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2013.
How many hours a week do you work? The creative process starts in the mind and can happen at 3 p.m. or 7 in the morning, or sometimes not until three days later. The ideas and creative process are not bound by time. It is nonlinear.
By Sebastian Smee
LOS ANGELES — At 93, artist Betye Saar, active since the 1960s, has done enough to warrant some big-time institutional attention. She’s getting it.
Best known for her assemblages, Saar is the subject of two solo shows this fall: one at the Museum of Modern Art when it reopens in Manhattan on Oct. 21; the other at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Neither is a full-blown retrospective. But simultaneous solo shows at leading art museums on both coasts sounds like a celebration to me — and Saar surely deserves it.
By Christopher Knight
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. Since then, her work has been seen in more than 80 solo shows in galleries and museums. Size, however, can be deceptive. Think of the LACMA gallery as a kind of one-room schoolhouse. Two lessons are on offer, both very big.
By Colony Little
LOS ANGELES — Last week a video of two strangers in a store harmonizing Cheryl Lynn and Luther Vandross’s timeless classic, “If This World Were Mine,” went viral and stole the hearts of R&B music lovers everywhere. The singers smoothly traded vocal riffs in a beautiful, soul-soothing moment that captures the spiritual essence of music as a powerful healing force in weary times. The oral tradition of call and response has roots in African cultural traditions that survived the horrors of slavery, later transforming into the distinctly American music genres of gospel, jazz, and blues. In this unique form of musical alchemy, a question is asked by one and answered by another. Betye Saar’s exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), titled Call and Response, is like a visual rendering of this practice.
By Vivian Ducat
Betye Saar, the ever photogenic high priestess of politically potent assemblage sculpture, is still at work in her Hollywood Hills studio. At 93, after almost 50 years of exhibiting her art, Saar is finally ready to reveal the scaffolding that underlies her creative process—her sketchbooks. These small spiral-bound records of her trips and inspirations also chronicle the multi-year evolution of her ideas for particular pieces. These will be displayed alongside her sculptures in an exhibition opening this weekend at LACMA. Sketchbooks from Saar’s travels—filled with richly toned gouaches, watercolors, marker drawings, and pen-and-ink sketches—will also be on view. “They are beautiful,” says LACMA’s senior curator of modern art, Carol S. Eliel, who organized the show. “They are truly altar pieces of aesthetic pleasure.”
By Victoria Stapley-Brown
The LACMA exhibition will show how the US artist’s works develop over decades from initial sketchbooks to finished assemblages. Betye Saar prefers to spend time making new work rather than organising a full retrospective, says Carol Eliel of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma). Eliel has instead fulfilled the 93-year-old artist’s wish to stage a small career-spanning show that includes new works. The exhibition of around 40 objects from 1971 to the present is the first to look at the relationship between Saar’s sketchbooks and assemblage works, which she makes from secondhand finds like furniture and washboards. The show’s title, Call and Response, references the way Saar says these found objects “call” to her, while also nodding to traditional African American music. “She’s very steeped in black history, she’s very spiritual,” Eliel says.
Hosted by Madeleine Brand
A new exhibit from Los Angeles artist Betye Saar opens this weekend at LACMA. It’s called “Betye Saar: Call and Response." It looks at the 93-year-old artist’s entire career, including the small sketches that would become her finished works. Saar’s art is often made out of objects she finds at flea markets and junk stores. All her pieces are constructed to tell the story of race in America.
By Holland Cotter
At 93, with major attention finally coming her way, an artist central to the black women’s revolution says she’s waited long enough.
LOS ANGELES — I ask the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums — the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — if she has any theories as to why big-ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips mentioning the obvious factors: She’s a woman; she’s black; she’s lived her whole life on what she calls “the other side of the planet” (Southern California). “Because it’s about time!” she says. “I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.”
Betye Saar: Call and Response
When: September 22, 2019–April 5, 2020
Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)(5905 Wilshire Blvd, Mid-Wilshire, Los Angeles
While Betye Saar is a Los Angeles native, this exhibition is, shockingly, her first California museum retrospective. In LACMA’s words, Saar has been overlooked “no doubt largely because she is a black woman who came of age in the 1960s outside of New York City.” This exhibition is a must-see, as it surveys her long career and takes a special look at the artist’s lesser known travel sketchbooks.
Betye Saar Will Paint MoMA the Color Purple – The 93-year-old artist who has two major exhibitions, one at MoMA in New York and the other at LACMA, has now gotten a New York Timesprofile, too. “It’s about time,” she tells Holland Cotter, referring to the shows. The Watts-born artist— who has always lived in Southern California, or, in her own words, “The other side of the planet”—gave Cotter a tour of her home and studio, which is full of her assemblages, watercolors, and, of course, found objects. Big reveal: Saar says that for her MoMA show the normally white gallery walls will be painted purple, “for the first time ever.” (NYT)
By Trina Calderón
Betye Saar is a legend of the Los Angeles art community. Defying racist and sexist social norms of the 20th century, she studied design and fine art in southern California universities and grew into a bold visual artist challenging negative ideas about African-Americans throughout her distinguished career — a career which is still expanding at warp speed even as she enters her 90s.
“My red-footed tortoise Ms. Rojo is 18 years old. It took me three years to find her; I bought her at a Petco. She loves strawberry tops, Rojo. She’s not a cuddly pet; she’s just to look at, moves slowly, sleeps most of the time, has a hiding place. The Uneasy Dancer poster from Fondazione Prada is on the wall to make me feel proud that I had a residency there. Prada was really curious: What does the title mean? What does uneasy mean? I said, ‘Sort of restless—like dance. Something that has a routine but you feel uneasy about.’
By Deborah Vankin
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will honor artist Betye Saar and filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón at its 2019 Art + Film Gala, the museum announced on Wednesday.
The annual event, to be held on Nov. 2, is typically a who’s who of the art, fashion and film worlds, with a heavy representation of civic leaders and celebrities in attendance. It’s LACMA’s premier fundraiser. Last year’s gala, honoring artist Catherine Opie and filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, raised more than $4.5 million for the museum.
By Jordan Riefe
The actor and artists Mark Bradford and Kenny Scharf, along with art philanthropists and admirers, gathered to honor the L.A. native who is having a moment at age 92.
The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles honored one of the city's favorite daughters, Betye Saar, on June 1 with a Benefit Brunch attended by art world luminaries including Mark Bradford, Kenny Scharf, MOCA director Klaus Biesenbach and actor CCH Pounder, who led a tribute to the artist.
By Leah Ollman
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.
By Jasmine Weber
A 1977 documentary explores how Betye Saar’s mythic altars illustrate the personal and political implications of Black identity. For decades, Betye Saar has stunned viewers with her altars devoted to Black spiritualities and liberation.
By Victoria L. Valentine
THE SMITHSONIAN’S ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART interviewed Robert Colescott about his life and work in 1999. Paul Karlstrom, who spent his entire three-decade career at the archives as West Coast regional director, conducted the oral history interview with the artist. Toward the end of the conversation, the racially and politically charged nature of Colescott’s work came up and Karlstrom invoked Betye Saar‘s name as an example of another artist covering similar terrain. “I don’t know all of her work. I do know her,” Karlstrom said. “I think her papers are going to come to the archives.”
By Jori Finkel
African-American art history resources could be described as something of a diaspora: Early letters by an important artist might be held at one university, her most prominent exhibition materials filed away at a museum, and notebooks and sketchbooks still stashed away in the artist’s studio. Today the Getty Research Institute is announcing a new program to help bring the pieces together: The African American Art History Initiative.
At its heart are plans for the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, the academic branch of the J. Paul Getty Trust, to strengthen its African-American holdings through key archival acquisitions, and it has begun by collecting the papers of the pioneering assemblage artist Betye Saar, who lives in the city.
By Jessica Gelt
The Getty Research Institute announced Tuesday the creation of an African American Art History Initiative with the acquisition of the archives of Los Angeles assemblage artist Betye Saar.
The initiative, which launched with a $5-million endowment, aims to establish the Getty as a primary center of scholarship, research and education for African American art and as a model for like-minded endeavors in the field.
“It’s taken a long, long time for the art world in general to figure out that there are African American artists,” said Saar, 92, over the phone from her studio. “Fifty years ago, we didn’t have the kind of recognition we have today, and it still has a long way to go.”
The Getty initiative, however, signals some real advancement, Saar said.
By Holland Cotter
It will be a happy day when racial harmony rules in this land. But that day’s not coming any time soon. Who could have guessed in the 1960s, when civil rights became law, that a new century would bring white supremacy tiki torching out of the closet and turn the idea that black lives matter, so beyond obvious, into a desperate battle cry?
Actually, African-Americans could have seen such things coming. No citizens know the national narrative, and its implacable racism, better than they do. And no artists have responded to that history-that-won’t-go-away more powerfully than black artists. More than 60 of them appear in the passionate show called “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” now at the Brooklyn Museum, in a display filling two floors of special exhibition space with work that functioned, in its time, as seismic detector, political persuader and defensive weapon.
By Steven Nelson
For nearly 70 years, Betye Saar has created prints, collages, and assemblages that transform the cast-off and forgotten into powerful explorations of African American history and identity, the politics of race and gender, spirituality, and the occult. To visit her Los Angeles studio is to enter the world of a brilliant collector. Carefully categorized and filed, everything has its place. Black memorabilia, African sculptures, washboards, cages, scales, buttons, and myriad knick-knacks await assemblages in progress. This is a home to things cast off and forgotten, things waiting to be activated.
By Carolina A. Miranda
They stand as most unusual sentinels around the perimeter of the gallery. A black mammy figure in a red dress holds a broom and a rifle. Another in a dotted apron clutches a high-powered rifle. Yet another, decked out in blue dress and white apron, brandishes a large pistol in each hand, along with a look of total exasperation.
In American popular culture the mammy figure was a depiction of servility. But in the hands of Los Angeles artist Betye Saar, she becomes a warrior, brandishing weapons, contending with injustice, facing the darkest chapters of American history.
By Jonathan Griffin
Betye Saar’s double exhibition at Roberts & Tilton coincides with the opening of her career survey at the Fondazione Prada, Milan. The first exhibition, titled Black White (which opened a month before the second exhibition), is a more concise presentation in the gallery’s project space that arranges assemblage sculptures and collages spanning from the present back to an early etching by the artist – now a nonagenarian – from 1964. Blend, the second and more generously spaced display (actually including fewer works), occupies the main gallery. Its focus is the major mixed media installation Mojotech (1987), which stretches nearly 7.5 metres along one wall and was the outcome of a residency Saar undertook at the List Visual Arts Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in Cambridge.
By Leah Ollman
Betye Saar works with materials that have long metaphorical half-lives and with metaphors that she assigns striking material form. It's tempting to liken her to a chemist handling potentially toxic substances, but most of the found objects in her assemblages are familiar — and ordinarily benign. She releases their potency and reactivity through isolating and recombining them. She is more like a poet who takes everyday language, spikes it with terms obsolete and retrograde, and invests it with new resonance through the tools of disjunction, recontextualization, concentration and enjambment.
Saar, 90, is what the Japanese would term a living national Treasure. Any opportunity to see her work is a privilege, one that promises to wrench, incite and nourish. The work oscillates between toughness and beauty and typically fuses the two.
Betye Saar
As told to Jonathan Griffin
The US artist reflects on the art and events that have shaped a career spanning almost seven decades.
"I’ve lived in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, for about 50 years. I am at a sad place in my life, a crossroads – my brother has just passed away – and I have been thinking about why there is a certain feeling in my artwork that seems grim but really isn’t. The crossroads is about death and rebirth, and how important that is to my practice. I’ve made prints, collages and decorative pieces but the works that I feel are strong and significant are those which revolve around death and rebirth."
By Sola Agustsson
When my grandmother turned 90 this year, our family created a tributary artwork that incorporated various symbols she uses in her body of work. It was a garden sculpture loosely based on her piece “Black Girl’s Window” (1969), a female figure surrounded by our copper engravings of symbols including the Siren, the Eye of Horus, the palmistry hand and other common motifs in her work. It seemed fitting to repurpose her iconography in our collective work, as her assemblages recycle everyday objects and metaphysical symbols as well as her ancestor’s possessions. Now a nonagenarian, Betye Saar continues to create artworks with just as much ferocity, drawing on the same themes of race, mysticism and gender from her earlier work.
By Carolina A. Miranda
Betye Saar is an artist whose life’s work has consisted of creating careful arrangements of objects. So it should come as no surprise that her Laurel Canyon studio is also a careful arrangement.
Vintage clocks of all shapes and sizes line its walls. One table holds a graceful cluster of antique bird cages. Another is filled with masks and locks and colored glass in various shades of red — reminiscent of the all-red environmental installations she’s created in recent years.
As told to Maya Harder-Montoya
An icon of assemblage art whose work has stood proudly at the intersection of the personal and political since the 1960s, Betye Saar draws from such broad references as the work of Joseph Cornell and occult traditions of palmistry and voodoo. In her groundbreaking 1972 sculpture The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, for instance, Saar issues a challenge to stereotypes of race and gender by reclaiming the power of historically charged materials. Here, as Saar approaches what she calls her “ninetieth revolution around the sun,” she discusses her current retrospective, which brings together works from across her six-decade career. The exhibition is on view from January 30 through May 1, 2016, at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Scottsdale, Arizona.
By Shelley Leopold
Artist Betye Saar, an important part of the Black L.A. art movement in the 1970s, and one of Los Angeles' modern art iconoclasts, watched Simon Rodia build the Watts Towers as a child. This experience went on to subconsciously influence her penchant for collecting as well as the detailed execution of her own art, even though she tried her hand at social work, graphic design, and enamel jewelry before she found her voice as one of America's most important assemblage artists. On a recent visit, I learned Saar is someone who embodies the notion of speaking softly while carrying a big stick. She is a diminutive firebrand, beautiful and energetic despite her 89 years, ready with stories and recalling events as if they happened yesterday.
By Mike Boehm
Los Angeles artist Betye Saar has won the 2014 Edward MacDowell Medal, a lifetime achievement award given by America’s oldest artists’ colony, joining an elite roster of honorees dating back to 1960.
She’ll receive her award Aug. 10 in ceremonies on the MacDowell Colony’s 400-plus acre campus in Peterborough, N.H. The cast-bronze medal bears the image of the man who founded the colony in 1907 as a gathering place where artists in diverse disciplines could mingle while pursuing their individual work.
By Sway Benns
You’re wandering through the brush, looking for sustenance, the sun beating down on your concave chest. Suddenly an object falls from the empyrean heaven. You cautiously pick up this small vessel, clear as water—but hard—and emblazoned with the characters C O C A C O L A. You come to admire its aesthetics and functionality, and that’s a problem because there’s only one, and the rest of your tribe has come to admire it too. Swept up in idolatry, you’re unaware of the fact that the object of your affection is merely a mortal afterthought.
By Hilarie M. Sheets
Artists who are going strong at 80 and up find that old age offers freedom, self-assurance, and room to explore.
At what age do people hit their stride professionally? Categorically speaking, athletes, engineers, politicians, television writers, salesmen, and actresses all have varying norms and shelf lives, sometimes affected by physical attributes or societal expectations. Seemingly immune to ageist perceptions and traditional notions of retirement are artists. A historical look reveals that a striking number have been highly productive and turned out some of their best work late into old age, including Bellini (who died at 86), Michelangelo (d. 89), Titian (d. between 86 and 103, depending on your source), Ingres (d. 86), Monet (d. 86), Matisse (d. 84), Picasso (d. 91), O’Keeffe (d. 98), and Bourgeois (d. 98).
By Leah Ollman
Call it a serial retrospective, the sprinkling of Betye Saar’s work throughout a substantial spread of Pacific Standard Time shows. Whatever each exhibition’s context—overall survey of the postwar decades, focus on the evolution of L.A.’s African-American art scene, a look at art of the late ‘60s/early’70s as cultural critique—Saar’s work matters and is seminal to the particular art historical lesson being taught.
Betye Saar as told to Catherine Wagley
The black revolution was always in your living room: the Watts riots, the marches, these horrific images of hoses and dogs attacking protesters. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I thought, what can I do? I had friends and neighbors whose teenage sons went to the South to protest but, you know, as a woman, I couldn't do it. As a mother, I couldn't do it. Making art was my vehicle to express my anger and the pain that I felt.
As told to Catherine Wagley
The black revolution was always in your living room: the Watts riots, the marches, these horrific images of hoses and dogs attacking protesters. When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I thought, what can I do? I had friends and neighbors whose teenage sons went to the South to protest but, you know, as a woman, I couldn't do it. As a mother, I couldn't do it. Making art was my vehicle to express my anger and the pain that I felt.
In the 1960s, those of us artists who hung out in the Brockman Gallery, one of the first galleries opened by members of the black community in L.A., decided to attend the National Conference of Artists meeting in Chicago. Artist David Hammons and I took the red-eye and stayed at the same hotel, across the street from the Field Museum. We walked over to the museum and went to the basement floor, which was filled with African, Indonesian and South Pacific art. Both of us were transformed by that exhibition.
