Betye Saar’s Magic Touch

By Ariana Marsh

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

We’re at Roberts Projects as Saar does the first walkthrough of “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” a revelatory exhibition opening May 30. Honoring Saar’s 100th birthday this summer, the show gathers more than 200 objects—including costume designs, garments, jewelry, theatrical ephemera, and photographs—to explore a lesser-known but deeply formative period of Saar’s life, reframing those works not as a side note to Saar’s assemblages, but as the creative wellspring from which much of her larger practice emerged. (Other celebrations of Saar’s centennial this year include “Betye Saar's Black Dolls” at the New York Historical Society.)

During the years the exhibition spans—the 1950s through the 1970s—Saar was raising her three daughters Lezley, Alison, and Tracye in Laurel Canyon while designing costumes for productions at Los Angeles’s groundbreaking Inner City Cultural Center. At the same time, she was teaching, making greeting cards and enamel objects for extra income, and sewing clothing for friends and family. “I never considered myself an artist [then],” Saar tells me later that afternoon. “Always as a designer.” Yet she was slowly developing the visual language that would eventually transform contemporary assemblage.

Saar doesn’t move through the show with the heaviness of someone revisiting old glory. Instead, she repeatedly stops short in front of enlarged production photographs and costume renderings from decades earlier, letting out delighted little gasps as she recognizes a face, a fabric, a performer, a memory. “Ohhhh!” she says at one point, visibly thrilled by the scale of a blown-up stage image.

“I’m the kind of person that lives the moment and then I move on,” she tells me. “So I said, ‘Oh yeah, that was fun to make.’ And then to see it blown up, I said, ‘Oh boy, that’s fun!’”

Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar was only five years old when her father died, prompting her mother to move the family into her paternal grandmother’s home in Watts. On walks through the neighborhood, Saar regularly passed Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, seeing firsthand how discarded materials could be transformed into something monumental, even magical. “I was a person that never threw away anything,” Saar tells me with a giggle. “Even as a kid, my mother would say, ‘You’ve got to clean up your room.’ I would just hide things.”

Saar’s mother was a seamstress and her grandmothers painted china and made quilts—all valuable handcrafts during the Depression, when buying clothes was often out of the question. “If we wanted a new dress, we had to make it,” Saar recalls.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena was another important space for the artist, who still remembers visiting with her mother and aunt when she was as young as 12 and marveling at the plants and strange natural landscapes. Decades later, in 2023, Saar would return to the Huntington for one of her major institutional commissions, Drifting Toward Twilight, an immersive installation featuring a 17-foot vintage wooden canoe filled with found objects, antlers trapped inside birdcages, children’s chairs, and branches, leaves, and flowers gathered from the grounds themselves. “Even in death those things can be really beautiful,” Saar explained in a video about the piece.

“I like to think the Huntington Gardens generated her kind of lifelong love for nature,” curator Christina Nielsen tells me. Saar still gardens nearly every day at her home, where plants spill across multiple levels of the property. “In history, the magic took place in gardens,” she tells me. “Witches grew certain plants that cast spells to cure something or to harm something.”

Saar was photographed at the Huntington for this story by Tyler Mitchell, surrounded by the desert plants she loves most. At one point, Mitchell recalls, she was determined to climb toward a particularly dramatic cactus for a photo, despite warnings from Huntington staff about the steep terrain. “She didn’t care at all,” he says. “[She said] ‘tell them I live up in the mountains, I’m used to this!’ That says everything about her.”

In 1944, Saar enrolled at Pasadena City College before transferring to UCLA two years later, graduating in 1949 with a degree in design and a minor in sociology. Saar has spoken about how, at the time, schools remained segregated and the possibility of becoming a professional artist was still largely unimaginable for Black women.

After graduating, Saar worked briefly as a social worker while building a creative life through whatever means were available: making enamelware and jewelry with artist Curtis Tann, whom she met through Pasadena’s small but growing Black artistic community, and selling handmade objects at fairs around Los Angeles. A major turning point came while Saar was pursuing a teaching credential at California State University, Long Beach following the birth of her second daughter, Alison, in 1956. Walking past a printmaking studio one day, she became transfixed and soon, she was making prints from a makeshift home studio improvised in her kitchen. (“Every year around Christmastime, I would have a studio sale,” Saar tells me. “I would make things to make Christmas money.”) Another creative revelation arrived in 1967, when Saar encountered the boxed assemblages of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum.

The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 pushed Saar toward more overtly political work. “I remember how I felt physically, just really angry and upset,” she recalled in an interview with LACMA. “But I was a mother with young children. I couldn’t walk in protest. But I did have a weapon and that was art.” Within a few years, Saar would create seminal works including Black Girl’s Window (1969) and The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), groundbreaking assemblages that transformed racist imagery and found objects into meditations on Black identity, spirituality, memory, and resistance.

At 42, following her divorce from artist and conservator Richard Saar, she joined Los Angeles’s Inner City Cultural Center as an apprentice costume designer through a Ford Foundation-funded theater training initiative in partnership with UCLA. Founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, the six-day uprising sparked after white police officers violently beat 21-year-old Black motorist Marquette Frye during a traffic stop, the ICCC imagined art as both cultural bridge and social healer. The theater welcomed performers and audiences across racial and cultural lines at a moment when much of Los Angeles remained deeply segregated, and it would go on to help launch the careers of artists including George Takei, Carmen de Lavallade, Robert Ito, Nobu McCarthy, Edward James Olmos, and Forest Whitaker.

Over her three years with ICCC, Saar eventually became ICCC’s first costume mistress, a salaried role she needed to support her family. Still, ICCC productions operated on limited budgets, forcing Saar to improvise constantly. “I would go to secondhand stores, especially for men’s costumes,” she recalls. “I’d buy old suits and things like that.” Other times, she’d spot a fabric or pattern she liked and completely reconstruct the garment around it.

The costume renderings now gathered inside “Let’s Get It On” reveal just how fluidly Saar moved between fashion, collage, design, and fine art during this period. The section devoted to a 1969 production of West Side Story features fluorescent costume sketches displayed alongside massive archival production photographs. Elsewhere are her lavish designs for Burlesque Is Alive (1970), staged as a double bill with Tennessee Williams’s The Gnadiges Fraulein, where feathers, sequins, tassels, and sheer fabrics transformed performers into visions of glamour and sensuality.

By the time Saar was making costumes for Inner City Cultural Center’s 1972 production of Antigone, it’s clear her sketches had already begun to resemble assemblages themselves. Renderings of jewel-toned gowns and dramatic capes unfold against collaged faux wood grain, botanical motifs, patterned paper, and textured scraps. “I liked to make my design sketches like pieces of art,” Saar says, “with a background, like a curtain or something.”

Working in the theater had forced Saar to relinquish a degree of artistic control: Costumes had to function on living bodies. “I’d have to go to the actor, see if they liked it,” she says. “‘Then it was, ‘Well, I can’t wear that because I can’t move in that.’” Adjustments followed, as did negotiations with directors and budget constraints. Still, Saar says, “I really liked theater and I thought it was a challenge in a way, to have the costume be the visual part of what the character was.”

Many of Saar’s most enduring relationships emerged from the theater. Actress Marguerite Ray and performer Olga Adderley Chandler, whom she met through the Inner City Cultural Center, became close friends and early collectors of her work. Roberts says Saar encouraged many of the Black women around her to begin collecting art at a time when few institutions supported Black artists, much less Black women artists. “These women, very early on, were supportive of Betye,” says Roberts. “Betty was supportive of them. She introduced them to people. So it became this very natural, organic relationship.”

At home in Laurel Canyon, in the house and studio she still lives and works in today, Saar was making costumes and wares for herself, her daughters, and even Tracye’s beloved Steiff bears. The family regularly visited fabric stores like House of Fabrics and Home Silk Shop, flipping through giant Butterick and Simplicity pattern books while Saar imagined what she could fashion next. One black-and-white striped fabric, Tracye jokes, made the sisters look like “hybrid love children of the Addams family and the Von Trapps.”

About an hour into our meeting, when we’re all seated around a table of archival images and ephemera, Roberts turns to Saar and says, “Betye, show her your tattoo.” Standing with the help of her cane and pulling aside her sweater, Saar reveals a faded crescent moon and star tattooed onto her shoulder, the ink softly bleeding into her skin after decades there. “In the late ’70s,” Roberts explains, “Betye went to an art opening in the Valley where they were giving tattoos as part of the party.”

“I drew my own picture,” Saar adds matter-of-factly. Tracye mentions that her son, one of Saar’s grandsons, later got the same tattoo in honor of “Grand Betye.”

“I think he's still proud that he has an original Betye Saar,” Tracye says.

Looking at the motif now, it’s hard not to see the tattoo as an early example of the symbolic language Saar would spend decades building around herself and her work: moons, stars, eyes, snakes, charms, hands, protective objects charged with spiritual and emotional energy. Throughout her work, Saar repeatedly returned to astrology, palmistry, phrenology charts, cosmology, and other mystical systems.

That evolving vocabulary appears all over “Let’s Get It On,” stitched into leather “mojo” belts and necklaces fashioned from scraps gifted to Saar by artist Alonzo Davis, as well as the hand-tooled leather vests she created for folk singer and civil rights activist Len Chandler. “Mojo is a term for magical,” Saar explains. “Like that song, ‘Got My Mojo Working,’ [it means] I got my magic vision working.”

Saar’s Laurel Canyon home and studio is less a conventional workspace than a living archive. Drawers overflow with beads, scraps of fabric, wooden snakes, old photographs, celestial charms, costume jewelry, and found objects gathered across decades of travel, flea market hunting, performances, and daily life. Artwork spills across walls and shelves. Nothing is ever fully discarded; materials simply wait for reincarnation. Roberts recalls Tracye once recognizing a polka-dot fabric from a blouse Saar wore in the 1960s embedded inside a work made decades later.

The exhibition itself mirrors Saar’s artistic philosophy, assembled from fragments scattered across decades, collections, friendships, and family histories. Some jewelry pieces belonged to her daughters and grandchildren. Others resurfaced through former curators, assistants, and collectors. A few were even found online by Roberts and her team while reconstructing this chapter of Saar’s practice.

The final, smaller room of “Let’s Get It On” is dedicated to Saar’s broader creative output during these years: album covers for jazz musician Bennie Maupin, illustrations for Ishmael Reed, experimental films, work on Gordon Parks Jr.’s Super Fly, and appearances in Pasadena’s irreverent Doo Dah Parade, the countercultural answer to the Rose Parade.

In one photograph from 1979, Saar, Tracye, and performance artist Rachel Rosenthal pose in matching white coveralls embellished with ribbons, paint, or transparent pockets filled with trinkets like plastic eye motifs and black cat imagery. “Those little pockets were like little assemblages,” Saar tells me. “They each have something different.”

Over the decades that followed, Saar’s work entered the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Yet even now, Saar speaks less about legacy than continuation. “For Betye, all of life is art,” the Huntington’s Christina Nielsen says. “Everything she does is in the act of creating.”

Saar has lately been working in watercolor, and Tracye tells me the color she always runs out of first is blue. Almost daily, Saar rummages through her things and chooses what to paint, working on multiple sheets of paper at a time. “When I was young there were things that I wanted to say with my art,” Saar reflects in the “Let’s Get It On” catalogue. “Now, approaching 100, that’s not so true anymore. I keep making art, reinventing myself with watercolors. It’s kind of neat just painting things and not worrying about if it needs to sell or hang on someone’s wall.”

And then: “My thing, after all this time, is just to create art.”