Betye Saar Remains Guided by the Spirit

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The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.” That manifesto has guided both her lifelong habit of collecting curios and relics — picked up during her travels to Nigeria, Senegal, Mexico, Haiti and Brazil, and at swap meets in her hometown of Los Angeles — as well as her more than 60-year artistic practice, which similarly brings together and recontextualizes symbols and totems of the Black diaspora. “My daughter Tracye calls me a hoarder who found her calling,” Saar says. Some of the objects that Saar collects have sat unused in her converted-garage studio for years before finding their way into one of her artworks. Saar, who is 97, decides what to reach for based on something she has referred to over the years as “mother wit”: she feels when a wooden statue, antique doll or rusted dagger is calling to be used. Saar considers this selection process to be a sacred one. “I’ve always felt that old objects hold a power,” she says. “They’ve survived, and they have a sense of the previous owner. They have a spirit.”

In her studio, which is attached to her shingle-adorned, garden-guarded home in Los Angeles’s Laurel Canyon neighborhood, she keeps a curved metal bookshelf that resembles the bow of a ship, passed along by her granddaughter, who had bought it at an auction. It brings to mind one of her newest works: the large-scale installation “Drifting Toward Twilight,” a 17-foot-long vintage canoe that sits atop a bed of brambles harvested from the grounds of Los Angeles County’s Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. On view at the museum through November of next year, the readymade sculpture has been imaginatively altered by Saar. She added wood burrows to either end of the boat in order to disrupt the manufactured vessel with the delightful deformity of nature and, inside the boat, in place of passengers, she installed antlers, some of which are attached to the salvaged parts of an old merry-go-round. The canoe, itself a symbol of early America and the country’s long history of trade and forced migration, displays other antlers inside of antique cages. These last objects recur through Saar’s work as a shorthand for captivity. For decades, Saar’s own career was confined by the prejudices of the art establishment; although she has consistently shown and sold her work widely, it wasn’t until she was in her 90s that major museums and institutions took significant notice.

“‘Drifting Toward Twilight’ is truly a legacy work; it’s full circle,” Saar says. “I used to come to the Huntington with my mother when I was a child. She loved to garden, especially African violets, and she passed that love of plants and nature on to me.” Saar grew up in Watts, one of Los Angeles’s historically working-class neighborhoods, before her family moved outside of the city proper to the more affluent Pasadena, not far from the museum’s grounds. Beginning her career as a printmaker, she encountered the work of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1967, after which Saar began experimenting with what would become her signature mixed-media style. “They were beautiful and funny and fascinating,” Saar says of Cornell’s shadow box assemblages, many of which were made of repurposed junk. “I saw his work and realized that it was OK to make art out of anything.” One of her most famous pieces combines the influence of Cornell with an activist spirit: “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), an assemblage that centers on a derogatory mammy figurine standing atop a bed of cotton. Created in the aftermath of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1968 assassination, Saar’s doll turned the caricature of Black women as domestic servants on its head; arming her with a rifle and a hand grenade, Saar makes Aunt Jemima into a heroine, a protector, a self-emancipating revolutionary.