Betye Saar
Edited with text by Stephanie Seidel. Foreword by Alex Gartenfeld. Text by Sampada Aranke, Edwidge Danticat. Interview by Leah Ollman.
Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years.
With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.
Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar’s work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar’s work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight exhibition schedule: Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (October 28, 2021 - April 17, 2022); 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France (June 2022); Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland (February 2023).
Published by DelMonico Books / Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, 2022
Format: Hardcover, 8.25 x 10.75 in. / 208 pages / 150 color / 20 bw
English
ISBN: 9781636810362
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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.
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.