BIPOC Arts Spotlight: Betye Saar
As part of an expanded effort to build an all-inclusive and anti-racist artistic practice, I have commited to learning, gathering inspiration from, and sharing about BIPOC artists. This is the first installment of a series of monthly blog posts featuring BIPOC artists.
As my background is in Art History, I’m starting with an artist who was mentioned in my textbooks, but never heavily studied in my curriculum. This is the case with many artists of color throughout history, not because they have not made art, but because they historically have not had the platform, opportunities, social networks, or economic means, that White, predominantly male artists have had in order to become “successful” or receive recognition during their lifetime or posthumously.
Saar’s journey as an artist makes me think about how we define “success” in life and in the arts. Just like her, it took me a very long time to have the courage to call myself an “Artist”. It felt out of my league, pretentious or too self-assured about the work I do and what I produce. I am still very much struggling with getting others, my friends and family included (perhaps, especially), to take me seriously as an artist.
Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972
Mixed media assemblage
11.75 x 8 x 2.75 in (29.8 x 20.3 x 7.0 cm)
Collection of the Berkeley Art Museum; purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts (selected by The Committee for the Acquisition of Afro-American Art)
via Roberts Project
Born in 1926 and raised in Southern California to parents who came to Los Angeles in 1910 from Louisiana during the Great Migration, Betye Saar studied design at UCLA, and later printmaking at Long Beach City College. She is best known for her Assemblage dioramas built out of found objects and advertisements portraying derogatory stereotypes of Black figures like Mammies, Pickaninnies, and Uncle Tom characters. Her most famous work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), shows the smiling Mammy figure from Aunt Jemima syrup ads carrying a rifle, a broom, and a shotgun.
I used the derogatory image to empower the black woman by making her a revolutionary, like she was rebelling against her past enslavement...In 2007, the activist and academic Angela Davis gave a talk in which she said the black women’s movement started with my work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. That was a real thrill.
Betye Saar, In The Dell, 1960.
Etching
plate: 10 × 14 15/16" (25.4 × 38 cm); sheet (irreg.): 11 11/16 × 17 1/8" (29.7 × 43.5 cm)
MoMA; The Candace King Weir Endowment for Women Artists
--Betye Saar, “Influences: Betye Saar,” Frieze.com, Sept. 26, 2016.
In researching Betye Saar for this post, I came across her prints-- beautiful images of the mystical and occult in rich jewel tones. (I learned she even made enamel jewelry in her early years as an artist!) While Saar is best known for her pieces with direct political and social messages like The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, her work throughout her lifetime honors multi-layered personal histories and the histories and cultures of the global Black diaspora through family and found photographs, non-European religious symbolism, and cosmology, created alongside and in response to the Civil Rights Movement in the US.
Her work and legacy also makes me think of the many ways we can build resistance and activism into our daily lives. Everyday people were important to her: that she valued the responses of the mostly Black staff at the Whitney Museum over the critical and academic response to her exhibition in 1975 is exemplary of the People’s importance. Emotional responses are just as valid as intellectual responses.
Sometimes I worry that my work isn’t valuable if it doesn’t play with many levels of meaning. I have struggled with calling my work “art” over just “jewelry” or “craft”. I’m still figuring this out. But I make pieces to be worn and treasured by real people, who attribute their own meaning to the pieces they collect. Similarly, Betye Saar makes art to elicit response from and give voice to regular and marginalized people whose histories, spiritual beliefs, and cultural practices have been ignored, belittled, or virtually stamped out altogether.
For further contemplation of Betye Saar’s life and work, I highly recommend listening to the podcast by the Getty I relied on heavily as a source for this blog post.
Betye Saar, The Wounded Wilderness, 1962
Etching with relief printing
plate: 23 7/8 × 14 15/16" (60.6 × 37.9 cm); sheet: 25 9/16 × 16 5/8" (64.9 × 42.3 cm)
MoMA; Gift of Julie and Bennett Roberts, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles
SOURCES:
Molesworth, Helen. “Betye Saar: Working My Mojo.” Recording Artists, Getty. 12 Nov. 2019. https://www.getty.edu/recordingartists/season-1/saar/