Saar, Betye

Painter, sculptor, assemblage artist, installation artist, illustrator. Betye Saar is the mother of Alison Saar. She studied at the University of California and the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, California University in Long Beach and Northridge, as well as at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles. She taught at the Otis Art Institute of the Parson School of Design in Los Angeles from 1976. She was awarded honorary doctorates from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland in 1991; the Otis Art Institute of the Parson School of Design in Los Angeles; the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, and from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston in 1992; and from the California Art Institute in Los Angeles in 1995. She lives and works in southern California.

Saar assembles objets trouvés for her constructions, which evoke both the boxes created by Joseph Cornell and the ritual coffins used in the Afro-Cuban cults of La Santeria. She has been influenced by Simon Rodia, the creator of a monumental sculpture put together from objets trouvés entitled Watts Tower (1921-1954) which stands in the Black quarter of Los Angeles. She oscillates between being a militant artist, denouncing the condition of American Blacks oppressed as a consequence of slavery and pursuing a spiritual quest to pursue anything that makes up the collective Afro-American memory. She thus attempts to give positive depictions of racial stereotypes or popular symbols such as the American flag. In her famous assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) she transformed the stereotype of the fat Black nanny into a woman armed with a rifle in one hand and a bayonet and a grenade in the other. Aunt Jemima is also clenching a raised fist in the style of the Black Panthers. She illustrated A Secretary to the Spirits (Ishmael Reed, NOK Publishers, New York, 1978).