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| Artist Betye Saar, right, and basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, left, pose with scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. during Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., in October 2022. Saar and Abdul-Jabbar were among seven honorees recognized for their commitment to social justice. Saar, whose assemblage art confronted racist stereotypes and reclaimed Black imagery, died Sunday at 99, four days before her 100th birthday. (Photo credit: FAH1223, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons) |
Saar, the pioneering assemblage artist whose landmark “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” transformed one of America’s most enduring racist caricatures into an armed figure of Black resistance, died in her sleep Sunday at her Los Angeles home. She was 99, four days shy of her 100th birthday.
Her death was announced by Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represented her for nearly 20 years.
“Her singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art,” gallery co-founder Julie Roberts said in a statement.
For Saar, found objects were never simply old things. They carried the history of who made them, who used them and what America once believed it could sell without shame.
She used racist collectibles, domestic tools, family photographs, clocks, cages, dolls and discarded materials to confront Black identity, sexism, memory, spirituality and liberation. Her work made her a central figure in the Black Arts Movement and one of the most influential assemblage artists of the past century.
Her best-known work, the 1972 assemblage “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” was roughly the size of a shoebox.
At its center stood a stereotypical mammy figurine, the smiling domestic servant once used to reassure white consumers and romanticize Black servitude. Saar left the broom in the figure’s hand but also armed her with a rifle and a grenade.
The servant had become a soldier.
Saar created the work for an exhibition devoted to Black heroes at the Rainbow Sign cultural center in Berkeley, California. The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. four years earlier had pushed her work in a more openly political direction.
King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior,” Saar later said.
Saar understood the danger of putting racist imagery back on display. She worried about how white viewers might interpret it and how such images had shaped Black people’s perceptions of themselves.
“What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure,” she said.
The work preceded Quaker Oats’ decision to retire the Aunt Jemima brand by nearly five decades. When the company acknowledged in 2020 that the brand’s origins were rooted in a racial stereotype, Saar celebrated the decision but noted how long it had taken.
“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” became a defining work of Black feminist art. Angela Davis later credited it with helping inspire the Black women’s movement.
Saar did not abandon the stereotype or pretend it had never existed. She forced it to surrender its original meaning.
That question — whether racist images could be reclaimed without repeating their damage — remained central to Saar’s work and later placed her in one of the Black art world’s most contentious arguments.
In 1997, Saar participated in a letter-writing campaign criticizing Kara Walker, who had received a MacArthur Fellowship for her provocative silhouette scenes depicting slavery, sexual violence and the antebellum South.
Walker’s supporters viewed the work as an unsparing confrontation with America’s racist imagination. Saar feared that its imagery reinforced the degradation it sought to expose.
She called Walker’s work “revolting and negative” and said it served the “amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”
The dispute became an art-world version of a larger argument running through 1990s Black culture: Who controls images of Black suffering, who profits from them and when does exposure become exploitation?
Saar’s position was consistent with the work she had been making for decades. Racist images could be used, she believed, but they had to be stripped of their authority and redirected toward Black liberation.
Born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles on July 30, 1926, Saar spent part of her childhood in Watts, where she watched Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from broken ceramics, glass, shells, metal and other salvaged materials.
The towers showed her early what discarded objects could become in the hands of an artist.
Saar studied design at UCLA and initially worked in interior design, greeting cards and decorative arts. She later became a printmaker before a 1967 exhibition of Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes inspired her move toward three-dimensional assemblage.
Her 1969 work “Black Girl’s Window” placed the silhouette of a Black woman behind glass, surrounded by moons, stars, a skeleton, astrological signs and family imagery. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the work in 2019, decades after it was created.
Recognition from major institutions often came late.
Saar received a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, but large museums showed her work only sporadically for much of the following four decades. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted concurrent solo exhibitions.
She continued creating well into her 90s from the Laurel Canyon home and studio where she had lived since 1962. Her work moved among politics, family history, mysticism and the spiritual energy she believed objects carried from their earlier lives.
Even with her centennial approaching, Saar appeared less interested in assessing her legacy than in making something new.
“That’s what art is,” she told the Los Angeles Times in June. “Making something where there was nothing.”
Her 100th birthday is being commemorated with “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls,” an exhibition at The New York Historical in Manhattan. The exhibition, featuring 26 dolls from a promised collection of 100, continues through Oct. 4. Another exhibition, “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” remains on view at Roberts Projects through Aug. 22.
Saar is survived by her daughters, artists Lezley Saar and Alison Saar and writer Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh; six grandchildren; and Rojo, her red-footed tortoise.
For more than six decades, Saar showed that reclamation required more than placing an old stereotype in a new frame.
She gave the figure a weapon, changed who held the power and dared America to look at it again.
