Betye Saar

Betye Saar, born in 1926, American sculptor, whose mixed-media constructions combine personal imagery with political and spiritual concerns. Saar insists that 'anything can be used to make art.' In boxes, altars, and room-sized installations (see Installation Art) she combines found objects such as lace, dolls, gloves, photographs, and hat pins with magical signs and symbols such as dice, a palm reader’s diagram, and fetish figures from traditional African rituals.

As a child growing up in Los Angeles, California, Saar often visited her grandmother in Watts, a predominantly African American community, where she witnessed artist Simon Rodia building the Watts Towers. These 30-m (100-ft) towers had a profound influence on Saar, as they were made of seemingly valueless, cast-off objects (broken bottles, dolls, and china, for example) transformed into an ambitious architectural assemblage. Saar was also inspired by an exhibition of the boxes and collages of American artist Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum in Los Angeles in 1966. When she began making her own assemblages at about that time, she incorporated into them a lifetime of collected objects.

In her earliest box constructions (from 1966 to the mid-1970s), Saar used stereotyped images of African Americans to proclaim a new power and dignity for blacks. For example, in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972, University of California, Berkeley) she transformed the demeaning image of a black woman as smiling servant into that of a smiling, gun-toting terrorist. I Got Rhythm (1972, collection of the artist) is a metronome with a racist image on its cover; through Saar’s careful combination of image, title, and object, the work took on the appearance of a ticking time bomb. Saar’s later works moved away from such direct reference to racial politics, but despite their more personal, nostalgic tone, these works remain focused on her identity as a black woman.

The artist was born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles. She first pursued a career in graphic design because in the 1940s, according to Saar, 'blacks were not particularly encouraged' to go into fine art. She received her B.A. degree from the University of California at Los Angeles in 1949. During the 1950s and 1960s she did graduate work in art, teaching, and filmmaking at California State University, Long Beach; the University of Southern California; California State University, Northridge; and the American Film Institute, all in the Los Angeles area. Saar sometimes creates collaborative works with her daughter, artist Alison Saar.