Betye Saar
Betye Irene Saar is an American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States.
Early life, education and family
Betye Saar was born Betye Irene Brown on July 30, 1926, to Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson in Los Angeles, California. Both parents attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where they met. Saar spent her early years in Los Angeles. After her father's death in 1931, Saar and her mother, brother, and sister moved in with her paternal grandmother, Irene Hannah Maze, in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. The family then moved to Pasadena, California, to live with Saar's maternal great-aunt Hatte Parson Keys and her husband Robert E. Keys.Growing up, Saar collected various ephemera and regularly created and repaired objects. Her college education began with art classes at Pasadena City College and continued at the University of California, Los Angeles, after she received a tuition award from an organization that raised funds to send minority students to universities. Saar earned a B.A. in design in 1947. She went on to graduate studies at California State University, Long Beach, University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and the American Film Institute. During her time in graduate school, she married Richard Saar and gave birth to three daughters: Tracye, Alison and Lezley.
Artistic career
Early work
Saar started her adult life as a social worker, and then later pursued her passion in art. She began her graduate education in 1958, originally working towards a career in teaching design. However, a printmaking class she took as an elective changed the direction of her artistic interests. She described printmaking as her "segue from design into fine arts".In Saar's early work she collected racist imagery and continued throughout her career. She was inspired to create assemblages by a 1967 exhibition by found object sculptor, Joseph Cornell. She was also greatly influenced by Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, which she witnessed being built in her childhood. Saar said that she was "fascinated by the materials that Simon Rodia used, the broken dishes, sea shells, rusty tools, even corn cobs—all pressed into cement to create spires. To me, they were magical."
In oral history interviews, Saar later recalled seeing extensive African, Oceanic and Egyptian art on a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago as being "an important step in my development as an artist... They had rooms and rooms of it. I had never seen that much." She found the robe of an African chief especially meaningful.
She began to create work that consisted of found objects arranged within boxes or windows, with items that drew from various cultures to reflect her own mixed ancestry: African American, Irish, and Native American.
Rejection of white feminism and reclaiming the black female body
Saar was raised by her Aunt Hattie, who influenced her identity as a Black woman. Saar described her great-aunt as a woman with dignity and poise, which impacted her depiction of the Black female body. This impact is evident in a work Saar dedicated to her great-aunt titled Record For Hattie, 1972. Saar's rejection of white feminism initially pushed her artistic focus on the Black male but in the 1970s she shifted her focus to the Black female body. Record For Hattie is a mixed media assemblage made from an antique jewelry box. Inside the top of the jewelry box is a broken picture frame containing a faded picture of a woman, representing her Aunt Hattie. Surrounding the picture frame rose materials are sewn along with a red and white star and crescent moon pendent. In the bottom of the jewelry box there is a metal cross on the right side, a red leather wallet in the middle, on top is an image of child, and on the left there are sewing materials.During the 1970s Saar responded to the racism, fetishization, and eroticization of the Black female body by reclaiming it. Saar's work resisted the artistic style of primitivism, as well as the white feminist movement that refused to address issues of race. Saar's work is a result of the convergence of Black power, spirituality and mysticism, and feminism, as seen in Black Girl's Window, 1969. Black Girl's Window is an assemblage piece made from an old window, in which the painted silhouette of a girl presses her face and hands against the pane. Above her head are nine smaller window panes arranged three by three, which display various symbols and images, including moons and stars, a howling wolf, a sketched skeleton, an eagle with the word "love" across its chest, and a tintype woman.
In the 1960s, Saar began collecting images of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and other stereotyped African American figures from folk culture and advertising of the Jim Crow era. She incorporated them into collages and assemblages, transforming them into statements of political and social protest. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima is one of her most notable works from this era. In this mixed-media assemblage, Saar utilized the stereotypical mammy figure of Aunt Jemima to subvert traditional notions of race and gender. "It's like they abolished slavery but they kept Black people in the kitchen as Mammy jars," Saar says of what drove her to make the piece. "I had this Aunt Jemima, and I wanted to put a rifle and a grenade under her skirts. I wanted to empower her. I wanted to make her a warrior. I wanted people to know that Black people wouldn't be enslaved by that."
Saar's assemblage is laid inside of a shoebox-sized frame, plastered with Aunt Jemima advertisements. A caricatured sculpture of Aunt Jemima presents a notepad with a photograph of a Mammy with a white baby depicted. The Aunt Jemima sculpture holds a broom and a rifle, subverting her happy servant and caregiver stereotype by way of a militant alter ego who demands her own agency and power. A large, clenched fist, echoing the Black power symbol, is collaged over and partially obscuring the Mammy photograph, recognizing the aggressive and radical means used by African American activists in the 1970s to fight for their rights. Aunt Jemima is liberated through transformation from a racist domestic caricature into an image of Black power.
Although Saar considers herself to be a feminist, she avoids referring to her artwork as such. Instead, Saar prefers to emphasize the elements of cross-culturalism and spirituality that are present in her pieces. During the early 1970s, Saar endured racism within the context of the white feminist arts movement. These experiences caused her to become interested in promoting a Black consciousness that was distinct from the Black power politics of the era. Saar's autobiographical representations of Black womanhood are not erotic and do not represent the body in an explicit manner; therefore, they exemplify a resistance to imaging the Black body. This resistance suggests her rejection of white feminism and her rejection of the "feminine aesthetic" that is determined by white feminists and grounded in female sexuality.
Saar was supported as an artist-in-residence in Adelaide, South Australia, by the Women's Art Movement there in the 1970s or 1980s.
Assemblage and installation
Saar's lifelong habit of scouring flea markets and yard sales deepened her exposure to the many racial stereotypes and demeaning depictions of Blacks to be found among the artifacts of American commercial and consumer culture, such as advertisements, marketing materials, knick-knacks, sheet music, and toys. Three years later, she produced a series of more than twenty pieces that, in her own words, "exploded the myth" of such imagery, beginning with her seminal portrait of Aunt Jemima. In the 1970s, Saar moved on to explore ritual and tribal objects from Africa as well as items from African American folk traditions. In boxed assemblages, she combined shamanistic tribal fetishes with images and objects intended to evoke the magical and the mystical. When her great-aunt died in 1974, Saar acquired family memorabilia and created a series of more personal and intimate assemblages that incorporated nostalgic mementos of her great-aunt's life. She arranged old photographs, letters, lockets, dried flowers, and handkerchiefs in shrine-like boxes to suggest memory, loss, and the passage of time. This became a body of work she referred to as her "nostalgic series."In 1977, Saar created a piece entitled Spirit Catcher. It was inspired by and looks like a traditional craft item used in rituals, but was personally invented by her. She claims that although the object is not authentically sourced, it still has magical qualities. There is a mirror on the top of the artwork that could be interpreted as an evil eye against racism. Saar occasionally utilized organic materials in her work, such as bamboo, skulls, raffia, and rattan, and a few of these materials can be seen in Spirit Catcher. This assemblage piece caused many Los Angeles-based artists of color to see the straw and beads as a way to explore an organic and even mysterious sense of Blackness. Saar and this particular piece were also the subjects of a short television documentary entitled Spirit Catcher—The Art of Betye Saar, which aired on television in 1978.
In the early 1980s, Saar taught in Los Angeles at UCLA and the Otis Art Institute. In her own work she approached a larger, room-sized scale, and created site-specific installations. These included altar-like shrines exploring the relationship between technology and spirituality, and incorporated her interests in mysticism and Voodoo. Through the pairing of computer chips with mystical amulets and charms, these monumental constructions suggested the need for an alliance of both systems of knowledge: the technical and the spiritual.
Saar continues to live and work in Los Angeles, working primarily in found object sculpture. She has been awarded honorary doctorate degrees by California College of Arts and Crafts, California Institute of the Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, Otis College of Art and Design, and San Francisco Art Institute.
As of 2016, she celebrated her work with a couple parties and a solo show of new work at Roberts and Tilton Gallery.