Alison Saar
Alison Saar is a Los Angeles-based sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist. Her artwork focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity and is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art and spirituality. Saar is well known for "transforming found objects to reflect themes of cultural and social identity, history, and religion." Saar credits her parents, collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar and painter and art conservator Richard Saar, for her early exposure to art and to these metaphysical and spiritual practices. Saar followed in her parents footsteps along with her sisters, Lezley Saar and Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh who are also artists. Saar has been a practicing artist for many years, exhibiting in galleries around the world as well as installing public art works in New York City. She has received achievement awards from institutions including the New York City Art Commission as well as the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
Early life and education
Saar was born in Los Angeles, California, to a well-known African-American sculptor and installation artist, Betye Saar, and Richard Saar, a ceramicist and art conservator. Saar's mother Betye was involved in the 1970s Black Arts Movement and frequently took Alison and her sisters, Lezley and Tracye, to museums and art openings during their childhood. They also saw Outsider Art, such as Simon Rodia's Watts Towers in Los Angeles and Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village in Simi Valley. Saar's love of nature, intense interest in vernacular folk art and admiration of artists' ability to create beauty through the use of discarded items stemmed from her upbringing and exposure to these experiences and types of art. Alison worked with her father as a conservator for eight years, starting while she was still in high school. This is where she learned to carve, and she notes that it later influenced the materials she would use in her pieces. Dealing with artifacts from different culturesChinese frescoes, Egyptian mummies, and Pre-Columbian and African arttaught Alison about properties of various materials, techniques, and aesthetics. Family has continued to play a large role in Saar's work ranging from her inspiration to her process. In the words of author and interviewer Hadley Roach, "In Saar’s life, the kitchen table is the easel, the children are the assistants, and driftwood is periodically dragged in from the backyard to become somebody’s legs."Saar received a dual degree in art history and fine arts from Scripps College in 1978, having studied with Dr. Samella Lewis. After finishing her degrees Saar felt more compelled to pursue being an artist rather than studying art. Her thesis focused on African-American folk art. She received an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1981. While studying at Otis College of Art and Design, Saar created pieces with fiber art that referenced Mark Rothko and Tantric Art. She came to realize that she wanted to change her art form to something that was more expressive and engaging. In addition to their distinguished separate careers Saar and her mother Betye Saar have produced artworks together, such as House of Gris Gris. From her mother Alison "inherited a fascination with mysticism, found objects, and the spiritual potential of art."
Early career
In 1981, after graduating from Otis College of Art and Design, Saar and her husband, Tom Leeser, also an artist, moved to New York City. Together, they transformed a warehouse space in Chelsea into a loft apartment, and the tin tiles she found inside their apartment and other 19th- and early 20th-century buildings became a recurrent image in her sculptural works afterward.In 1983, Saar was an artist in residence in Harlem at the Studio Museum. She took had another residency in New Mexico in 1985. There, she integrated both her urban style with Southwest Native American and Mexican influences.
Saar lived in New York for 15 years, had two children, Kyle and Maddy and moved back to Los Angeles, where she currently lives.
Work
Saar is skilled in numerous artistic mediums, including metal sculpture, wood, fresco, woodblock print, and works using found objects. Her sculptures and installations explore themes of African cultural diaspora and spirituality. Her work is often autobiographical and often acknowledges the historical role of the body as a marker of identity, and the body's connection to contemporary identity politics. Snake Man, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, is an example of how the artist references both African culture and the human body in her work. The artist's multiethnic upbringing, multiracial identity and her studies of Latin American, Caribbean and African art and religion have informed her work. Saar investigates practices of Candomblé, Santería, and Hoodoo. Believing that objects contain spirits, she transforms familiar found objects to stir human emotions.Her highly personal, often life-sized sculptures are marked by their emotional candor, and by contrasting materials and messages she imbues her work with a high degree of cultural subtext. When asked about the motivation behind her practice of utilizing found materials she states "I’ve never really thought of my printmaking as political but very much about it being populist, accessible and affordable. I love the history of broadsides where people would print out a poem and plaster the city with them, and I’ve done a couple with poets."
Saar's sculptures frequently represent issues relating to gender and race through both her personal experience and historical context. Many of Saar's work include messages and themes of the history of African Americans. Her 2018 exhibit, Topsy Turvy, references the character Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, a longstanding racial stereotype. Saar reimagines Stowe's stereotype as a symbol of resilience and resistance instead, a character transformed through love after experiencing the vicious treatment of enslavement that left her cold and heartless.
Saar has identified her artwork with the intention of emotional evocation but has not identified her work as directly political. However, In a review of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, New York Times art critic Roberta Smith said that Saar's work was among the "few instances where the political and visual join forces with real effectiveness." Some of Saar's works directly reference contemporary issues, such Rise, as an ode to the Black Lives Matter Movement in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Of Saar's 2006 exhibition , critic Rebecca Epstein wrote, “ demonstrates deft skill with seemingly unforgiving materials. juggles themes of personal and cultural identity as she fashions various sizes of female bodies that are buoyant with story while solid in stance.”
Public installations
Saar has created several public works throughout the course of her career. One of her most publicized works of the early 2000s includes a memorial to Harriet Tubman titled Swing Low. This piece is located in Harriet Tubman Memorial Plaza, South Harlem, at the intersection of St. Nicholas Ave and Fredrick Douglas Boulevard on W 122nd Street. Saar is quoted describing her intentions for Tubman's representation within the work, stating that she depicted Tubman "not as the conductor of the Railroad but as the train itself, an unstoppable locomotive".A 2011 public collection of her works on display in Madison Square Park titled "Seasons" includes the individual pieces Spring, Fall, Winter, and Summer. Throughout these pieces Saar infused pomegranates into her imagery to reiterate the themes of Greek mythology that frame this work's creation. Inspired by the story of Demeter and Persephone, Saar incorporates the tale's motifs into her series of seasons.
The opening of the Paris Summer Olympics in 2024 marked the unveiling of a new public artwork by Saar in the Charles-Aznavour Garden on the city’s Avenue des Champs-Élysées. The monument, titled The Salon, depicts a Black woman holding an olive branch and a golden flame, surrounded by a circle of chairs that viewers are welcome to sit upon. It is meant to represent peace, as well as the power of women.
Themes
There are several reoccurring themes in Saar's oeuvre including those of mythology, girlhood, and familial relations. In an interview with New York Times magazine Saar discussed her relationship with the Yoruba goddess of childbirth and rivers—Yemoja: "Yemoja crops up in my work a lot. I first discovered her when I was living in New York in the 1990s, trying to grapple with being a young mother and having a career — it felt like a real balancing act. I did a piece then called “Cool Maman,” who is balancing actual pots and pans on her head, all white enamelware. I see Yemoja as not only helping me in terms of patience and balance and child rearing but also as a watery, life-giving spirit who nourishes my creative process."Blank eyes rendered without pupils are a consistent visual motif across Saar’s print and sculptural work. Saar spoke directly to this as part of a touring retrospective of her print work titled “Mirror, Mirror.” At an artist talk at the Weatherspoon Art Museum in 2019 Saar noted that the blank eyes are “kind of masks in some sort of way,” a strategy for maintaining dignity during enslavement. For Saar, the pupil-less eyes are a way of denying the viewer’s satisfaction through refusal. Her figures do not return the gaze as a mode of control “in times of unimaginable degradation.” The exhibition's name also points to one of Saar’s preoccupations in the printmaking process. To make a print, she asserts, one must render the image in reverse. For Saar, “There are these dual worlds that simultaneously exist.” Deeply knowledgeable of African-diaspora spiritualisms, mirrors function for Saar as a kind of portal, “an invitation to spirit… revealing things we may not be able to see with the naked eye.”