Betye Saar (née Brown) is an African American assemblage artist who specializes in multimedia collage, installation, and sculpture. She was born in Los Angeles in 1926, grew up in the Watts neighborhood of that city, and moved to nearby Pasadena when her father died. She attended Pasadena Junior College (now Pasadena City College) and studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). After she graduated from UCLA in 1949, she worked as a social worker and started an enamel and jewelry business with Curtis Tann called Brown and Tann. She also worked as a costume designer at Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles. She took graduate courses in printmaking at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles and San Fernando Valley State College (now California State University, Northridge), but pivoted to creating box sculptures after seeing an exhibition of Joseph Cornell’s work at the Pasadena Museum of Art (now the Norton Simon Museum). She has taught at both UCLA and the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles (now Otis College of Art and Design).[1]
As a contributor to the Black Arts Movement, Saar often provides in her work political commentary on the dehumanization of Black people. Her highly acclaimed and influential work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima features a three-dimensional stereotyped Black woman holding a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other, with tiled images of the Black woman seen on Aunt Jemima product packaging in the background. As one scholar has described, “For Saar, to be an artist means also to be a historian, memorialist, narrator, autobiographer, participant-observer, witness, collector, salvager, and spiritualist.”[2] Death is also a central theme in her work. The deaths of her father and great-aunt informed the foundation of her autobiographical work, and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 pushed her in a political direction with her work.[3] She also has an interest in “mysticism, voodoo, magic, and ritual.”[4]
PMA Collection
PMA Library
Betye Saar: In Service, A Version of Survival: March 9-May 6, 2000
Betye Saar: Migrations/Transformations, September 8-October 28, 2006
Secrets, Dialogues, Revelations: The Art of Betye and Alison Saar
References
Bernier, Celeste-Marie. 2018. Stick to the Skin: African American and Black British Art, 1965-2015. Oakland: University of California Press.
Chanin, Clifford. 2002. In Memory: The Art of Afterward. Exh. cat., Sidney Mishkin Gallery, New York. New York: The Project.
Hills, Patricia, and Melissa Renn. 2005. Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George and Joyce Wein Collection. Boston: Boston University Art Gallery.
Macklin, A. D. 2000. A Biographical History of African-American Artists, A–Z. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Munro, Eleanor C. 1982. Originals: American Women Artists. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Rubin, Rachel, ed. 2018. Creative Activism: Conversations on Music, Film, Literature, and Other Radical Arts. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Endnotes
[1] Bernier 2018; Chanin 2002; Hills and Renn 2005; Macklin 2000; Munro 1982; Rubin 2018.
[2] Bernier 2018, 42; see also Hills and Renn 2005; Macklin 2000.
[3] Munro 1982; Rubin 2018.
[4] Chanin 2002, 40.
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