Betye Saar’s Blend is the final segment of a two-part survey spanning both gallery spaces. An exhibition of mixed mediaworks from1987-2016, Blend continues Saar’s exploration of color as a means to engage with a multiplicity of techniques, images, and ideas. Whereas the first installment, entitled Black White, introduced how specific ideas are expressed through the descriptive qualities of black and white, Blend is less of an application than integration. If we are to interpret Black White as an attitude, characterized not by its fidelity to an organizing principle but rather by its sharpness of delivery, then Blend is an exhale out. The release of tension, heaviness. The works on view are defined by several distinct qualities: they are ambiguous, arbitrary, and abstract. Seen together, the predominate coloris a subdued, nonspecific grey. Even works incorporating vivid neonand flashes of blue remain grounded to grey platforms and plinths. What is seen as a formulated shade is in fact its essence: what it implies, or suggests. It is as much a sensibility, mood, texture or weight than a color.

Grey in itself is an enigmatic color: a color of contradictions; unsettling and expectant; nearly unidentifiable. Unlike white or black, grey doesn’t subscribe to a specific belief system. It is here where Blend takes shape: in the reversal of expectations in terms of color, texture, and proportion. A slow burn.

Saar’s eagerness and curiosity in recontextualizing the familiar as alien, or magic, is none more so apparent than Mojotech (1987), a major work conceived when she was an artist in residence at M.I.T

A meditation on the intersections between tribal and technological magic, personal offerings including charms, amulets, and voodoo symbols share space alongside discarded circuit boards, electronic objects, and other technological debris reconfigured as sacred objects

Saar has long used her work as an organizing force for ritualized exchanges, rendering visible the experiential. It is in this gesture of reaching back that informs how Saar’s integration of collectivistic cultural orientations with individualistic practices collapses the boundaries between the natural and the manufactured, the historical against the present, the distance between black and white. Blend and Black White will remain on view through December 17, 2016.