Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present On the Shelf, a site-specific installation by Los Angeles artist Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles). Saar will exhibit six assemblage works from a new series shaped through her practice of recycling common objects. Vintage scales are among the many found materials employed to poignantly symbolize the gravity and weight of racism in America – past and present, in a continuation of Saar’s unwavering charge to create works of strong social and political content.

Widely recognized as a seminal Los Angeles artist, Betye Saar received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949, with graduate studies at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, and California State University at Northridge. Saar’s work is found in the permanent collections of over 60 museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York and most recently the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles which in 2014 acquired a major historical assemblage work from 1972. Saar’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Saar was featured in eight Pacific Standard Time exhibitions including Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (traveling to MoMA PS1, New York and is currently on view at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA). Recent exhibitions include Witness: Art, Activism and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY (traveling to Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH and The Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX).

Betye Saar received the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Distinguished Women in the Arts Award in 2013 and was honored in 2014 with the Edward MacDowell Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts. In June 2015, Betye Saar will mount a retrospective at Museum Het Domein, Sittard, Netherlands (a catalogue will accompany the exhibition.)