On View, Her Truth Of Black America
LOS ANGELES — I asked the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums — the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — if she has any theories as to why big-ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips the obvious: She’s a woman; she’s black; she’s lived her whole life on what she calls “the other side of the planet” (Southern California). “Because it’s about time!” she said. “I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.”
We were in her home, which is also her studio, in Los Angeles. She has lived and worked here since 1962. In the house, stacked vertically up the side of a ravine, the division between domestic and work space feels indeterminate. Order prevails but clear surfaces are hard to find.
For half a century, Ms. Saar has been one of America’s most inventive and influential makers of intimately scaled assemblage. And she has brought a distinctive range, encompassing global culture, popular mysticism, personal history and American racism.
Her studio is packed, chockablock objects grouped by type and color: alarm clocks, antique books, African masks, birdcages, globes, painted wood watermelon slices, Mexican healing charms and so-called mammy dolls piled on a chair.
“I consider myself a recycler,” Ms. Saar said. “I’ve been that way since I was a kid, going through trash to see what people left behind. Good stuff.”
Scavenging is how she gets the raw material for her art. Some works are curated time capsules preserving materials that were once owned by, or are reminders of, women in Ms. Saar’s family.
Others are symbolic self-portraits. In the 1969 “Black Girl’s Window,” which will anchor the MoMA exhibition, she surrounds a silhouette of her head with floating moons and stars; an etching of a lion, her birth sign; a tintype of a woman who could be her Irish grandmother; and, at the center, a novelty shop Halloween skeleton alluding to her father’s death when she was a child.
And there’s work that’s forthrightly political. A career-defining example, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” from 1972, was her response to the killing of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The main image here is a store-bought relief of a segregation-era plastic mammy meant to hold a notepad and pencil. Ms. Saar transformed it, replacing the pad with a Black Power fist and putting a rifle in the figure’s hand.
Her MoMA solo, “Betye Saar: The Legends of ‘Black Girl’s Window,’” which will debut on October 21, is a survey of her rare, early works on paper supplemented by a selection of her assemblages.
Ms. Saar has traveled extensively — to Bali, Brazil, Haiti, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal — always foraging for objects and images.
Everywhere she went, she carried small sketchbooks that worked as memory banks and portable studios. Many are repositories for preliminary pen studies for future assemblages. Others are filled with watercolor paintings that are polished creations in themselves. The show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” which opens on September 22, will reunite several sketchbooks with related finished works.
On my visit to her studio, there was an assemblage-in-progress exploring racism. In August, its components included two striking photographs, one of a young African woman playing a musical instrument; the other, an 1863 archival picture of an African-American man seen from behind, his bare back scarred from whippings. Ms. Saar positioned the pictures on either side of a child-size piano with missing keys, added an 18th-century diagram of a ship filled with slaves and capped the ensemble with an antique clock.
“It’s about slavery, before and after,” she said. “I call it ‘Skin Song.’ ” She later removed the photograph of the African woman. Improvisation has always been her modus operandi.
A second assemblage suggests a reliquary. It’s dedicated to Ms. Saar’s great-aunt Hattie. When Hattie died in the early 1970s, the artist inherited a trunk filled with personal effects. Over the years, she’s been preserving them in her work, inspired by the spiritual belief that the dead live on in what they’ve touched and treasured.
“I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art,” Ms. Saar said. “Because people don’t understand it. Writers don’t know what to do with it. They’re scared of it, so they ignore it. But if there’s going to be any universal consciousness-raising, you have to deal with it, even though people will ridicule you.”