Betye Saar

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Betye Saar (born July 30, 1926 in Los Angeles, California) is an African American artist known for her assemblage work.

Saar has been described as "a hero" in the field of contemporary art.

She is both a visual storyteller and a gifted printmaker.

Saar was a participant of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which challenged myths and stereotypes of race and femininity.

Her career has sparked controversies in the area of African-American studies, as she smears negative stereotypes of African-Americans throughout her career.

Personal life

Betye Saar was born in Los Angeles, California, on July 30, 1926, to Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson. Both parents attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where they first met. Saar spent her youth in Los Angeles. Saar, her mother, brother, and sister were relocated with her paternal grandmother, Irene Hannah Maze, in Los Angeles after her father's death in 1931. The family then moved to Pasadena, California, to live with Hatte Parson Keys and her partner Robert E. Keys, Saar's maternal grandmother.

Saar acquired various ephemera and occasionally made and repaired objects as a child. Her college experience began with art classes at Pasadena City College and then continued at the University of California, Los Angeles, after she was given a tuition award by an association that raised funds to send minority students to universities. Saar received a B.A. In 1947, a new look was introduced in architecture. She continued to graduate studies at California State University, Long Beach, University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and the American Film Institute. Tracye, Alison, and Lezley Saar were three children born during her time in graduate school.

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Artistic career

Saar began her adult life as a social worker and then moved to art. She began her graduate studies in 1958, initially focusing on teaching design. However, a printmaking class she took as an elective changed the course of her artistic pursuits. "Printmaking was her transition from design to fine arts," she said.

She began collecting racial imagery in Saar's early days and carried it on throughout her career. By a 1967 exhibition by found object sculptor Joseph Cornell, she was inspired to create assemblages. She was also heavily influenced by Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, which she saw being constructed in her childhood. Saar said she was "fascinated" by Simon Rodia's homemade pottery, cracked dishes, rusty pans, and even corn cobs, which were turned into cement to produce spires. They were magical to me.

Saar later described extensive African, Oceanic, and Egyptian art on a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago as "an important step in my growth as an artist." It had rooms and rooms. "I had never seen so much." She found the robe of an African chief especially useful.

She began creating work that consisted of found objects arranged inside boxes or windows, as well as items that reflected her own mixed ancestry: African-American, Irish, and Native American.

Saar was raised by her Aunt Hattie, who influenced her identity as a Black woman. Saar portrayed her Aunt as a woman with dignity and poise, which influenced her portrayal of the Black female body. In a work dedicated to her Aunt titled "Record For Hattie," Saar dedicates to her aunt. Saar's rejection of white feminism prompted her artistic interest initially on the Black male, but she later shifted her attention to the Black female body in the 1970s. Hattie's piece is a mixed media assemblage made from an antique jewelry box. A broken picture frame inside with a faded photo of a woman depicting her Aunt Hattie. Rose petals are sewn alongside a red and white star and a crescent moon pendent, with a red and white star over the picture frame. A metal cross on the right side, a red leather wallet in the middle, is included in the jewelry box, and on the left there are sewing supplies, with a child's portrait on top. Saar responded to racial,fetishization, and eroticization of the Black female body by reclaiming the Black female body in the 1970s. Saar's work defied primitivism's artistic style, as well as the white feminist movement that refused to address racial injustices. Saar's artwork is a result of a clash of Black power, spirituality, and misticism, as well as feminism, as seen in Black Girl's Window, 1969. The Black Girl's Window is an assembly work created from an old window in which the painted silhouette of a girl presses her face and hands against the pane. Nine smaller window panes arranged three by three, including moons and stars, a howling wolf, a sketched skeleton, a tintype skeleton, and a tintype woman are among the moon's and images on display, including moons and stars, a sketched skeleton, a sketched skeleton, a tintype eagle with the word "love" across its chest, tin

Saar began amassing photographs of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and other stereotyped African-American figures from folk culture and advertising of the Jim Crow period in the 1960s. She converted them into collages and assemblages, transforming them into political and social protest statements. Aunt Jemima's Liberation is one of her most famous works from this period. Saar used Aunt Jemima, a stereotypical mammy figure, to defy traditional notions of race and gender in this mixed-media grouping. "They abolished slavery, but Black people were in the kitchen as Mammy jars," Saar says about what prompted her to make the piece. "I had this Aunt Jemima and 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 to let people know that Black people would not be enslaved by that."

The assemblage of Saar's is placed within a shoebox-sized frame covered with Aunt Jemima advertisements. Aunt Jemima's caricatured sculpture includes a notepad with a snapshot of a Mammy with a white baby depicted. The Aunt Jemima sculpture has a broom and a rifle, subverting her cheerful servant and caregiver stereotype by way of a radical alter ego that seeks her own entity and control. A large, clenched fist is collaged over and partially obscures the Mammy photograph, emphasizing the Mammy photograph's active and radical tactics used by African-American activists in the 1970s to fight for their rights. Aunt Jemima is transformed from a racist domestic caricature to a symbol of Black power.

Although Saar claims to be a feminist, she avoids referring to her artwork as such. Saar's pieces, on the other hand, tend to emphasize the elements of cross-culturalism and spirituality. Saar fought bigotry in the early 1970s during the white feminist arts movement. These experiences led her to become interested in propagating a Black consciousness that was distinct from the times of Black power politics. The autobiographical representations of Black womanhood in Saar are not sexual and do not depict the body in a concrete manner; therefore, they represent a resistance to picturing the Black body. This resistance reveals her opposition to white feminism and her rejection of the "feminine aesthetic" that is rooted in female sexuality and deterministic.

The Women's Art Movement in Adelaide, South Australia, promoted Saar as an artist-in-residence in the 1970s or 1980s.

Saar's lifelong hobby of scouring flea markets and yard sales expanded her exposure to the numerous racial and demeaning representations of Blacks that can be found among American commercial and consumer culture's cultural treasures, such as advertisements, marketing materials, knicknacks, sheet music, and toys. She created a series of more than 20 pieces that "exploded the myth" of such imagery three years ago, beginning with her seminal portrait of Aunt Jemima. Saar explored ritual and cultural objects from Africa as well as African-American folk traditions in the 1970s. She mixed shamanistic tribal fetishes with photographs and objects intended to invoke the magical and the magical. Saar's great-aunt died in 1974, she acquired family memorabilia and created a sequence of more personal and intimate assemblages that incorporated nostalgic memories of her great-aunt's childhood. To invoke memory, loss, and the passage of time, she arranged old photographs, letters, lockets, dried flowers, and handkerchiefs in shrine-like boxes. This became a body of work she referred to as her "nostalgic series."

Saar created Spirit Catcher in 1977. It was inspired by and appears to be a common craft item used in rituals, but it was not invented by her. Although the object isn't properly sourced, it still has magical properties, according to Sherry. On the top of the artwork, there is a mirror that could be interpreted as an evil eye against racial hatred. Saar often used organic materials in her art, such as bamboo, skulls, raffia, and rattan, and a few of these materials can be seen in Spirit Catcher. Many Los Angeles-based artists of color were able to see the straw and beads as a way to investigate an organic and also mystic sense of Blackness in this assemblage work. "Spirit Catcher—The Art of Betye Saar," a short television documentary that aired on television in 1978, featured Saar and this particular piece.

Saar taught at UCLA and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles in the early 1980s. She started a larger, room-sized scale in her own practice and designed site-specific installations. They included altar-like shrines investigating the relationship between technology and spirituality, as well as studies in mysticism and Voodoo. These magnificent structures suggested the need for a collaboration of both technological and spiritual knowledge, based on the pairing of computer chips with magical amulets and charms.

Saar continues to live and work in Los Angeles, mainly in found object sculptures. She has received honorary doctorate degrees from 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.

She celebrated her career in 2016 with a few parties and a solo exhibit of new work at Roberts and Tilton Gallery.

Betye Saar's 1972 artwork The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was inspired by a knick knack, but it doesn't look like a painting, it's a three-dimensional mixed media assemblage 11 3/4" x 3/4". "Her painting gave the Black experience in America a long history," the journal Blacks in Higher Education states. Aunt Jemima is exaggerated in every way by stereotypes, according to Saar. She carries a large exaggerated colored dress as well as a bright checkered head piece. Her skin is shown as black, while her eyes are prominent bulging out of her head. Her lips are long and outlined in red color. She defys the myth of being black. They were only good for sweeping, and they were holding a broom in one hand. The woman also stands on cotton portraying slavery. "African-American artists as diverse as Betye Saar reclaim and explore their identity," the Woman's Art Journal states. "Not good enough" and "But it's good enough to serve" is the narrator. Although the piece depicts the Aunt Jemima holding a cleaning rod in her right hand, it also shows her holding a rifle in her left. This helps Saar to establish a visual link between Aunt Jemima and the concept of resistance. Aunt Jemima is depicted as being a likable figure who commands the viewer's interest and admiration by doing so. The Black women's movement, according to Angela Davis, was initiated.

Saar's essay "Influence" on Frieze, a little Aunt Jemima mammy statue, a caricature of a Black slave, was shown directly in the piece: "I discovered a tiny Aunt Jemima mammy figure, a caricature of a Black slave," she describes later on: "I learned a little Aunt Jemima mammy, a portrait of a Black slave. She had a broom in one hand, and on the other hand, I gave her a rifle. I made a little postcard of a mammy with a mulatto child in front of her, which is another way Black women were exploited during slavery. The derogatory picture was used to enslave the Black woman, portraying her as a hero who was rebelling against her enslavement in the past.

"Saar used Aunt Jemima's image to promote cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s," Richard Schur's book "Parodise of Ownership]. "Saar employed Aunt Jemima to combat cultural imperialism during the 1960s and 1970s[...] attempts to rectify the injustice perpetuated by over a hundred years of stereotyped advertising and pictures Aunt Jemima in an angry, defiant, and/or rebellious She wanted to advocate for political rights and shake stereotypes that were used to describe Black women. The artwork was inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's assassination.

"Betye Saar's Art Journal: Extending the Frozen Monument" James Cristen Steward states: "Against the backdrop of pancake packaging, a grinning popped-eye 'Mammy' stands out, with a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other." One arm balances a willing white child against her corset hourglass waste in the foreground, while the derogatory photographs speak for themselves. The broom refers to the domesticity that Black women were forced to work in service, confining them to specific areas. The majority of Black women's opinion about Black women was that they were only good for helping others. Through her art, she reveals two depictions of Black women, how stereotypes depict them, defeminizing and desexualizing them, as well as reality. Saar's idea of using the image of a warrior in a rifle to symbolize that Black women are strong and can withstand anything. "The intention behind this decision is to empower Black women rather than letting a white person's story determine how a Black woman should think about herself," Saar said.

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