Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as always: in the studio.
In a small, light-filled room near the top of the Laurel Canyon home where she’s lived since 1962, Saar spends the morning filling sketchbooks with watercolors. Symbols that the pioneering assemblage artist has been “remixing” for more than seven decades — stars, moons, eyes, hands — emerge in vibrant washes of magenta, teal and her favored crepuscular blues.
Later, sitting on an aluminum bench in one of her many-tiered patios, she flips between a blank page and another in which a serpent curves across a cerulean plane. “That’s what art is,” she says, flipping it again. “Making something where there was nothing.” She arranges four painted notebook covers together on her lap, forming a collage. “See,” she says, “you can use anything.”
And she has. Since the late 1960s, Saar has transformed washboards, dolls, clocks, family photographs, racist memorabilia and other salvaged materials into emotionally charged assemblages now held in the permanent collections of more than 60 museums.
“There are certain people,” says curator Zoé Whitley, “who redefined what was a very narrow definition of American art, and Betye is absolutely one of them.”
Saar’s studio is packed with relics gathered from sidewalks and swap meets in L.A., and from trips to Marrakesh, Mexico, Nigeria, Haiti and Brazil. Antique globes are mixed with model boats, window panes, wooden masks and painted watermelons. Mercantile scales and rusted bird cages are scattered across crowded shelves. Neatly labeled drawers hold hand fans, plastic snakes, buttons, buckles.
It can be difficult to distinguish where an arrangement ends and an assemblage begins. Materials, like symbols, are recycled across sculptures and tableaux in an inexhaustible loop.
On a late June afternoon, Saar seems more interested in filling another sketchbook than in any settled assessment of her legacy. “I’m not interested in making things to show or sell in a gallery now,” Saar says, adjusting her quilted cobalt vest. “It’s for me, and the moment, and the pleasure of creating.”
For this reason, family and close friends such as longtime gallerist Julie Roberts have taken on the work of accounting. Since 2016, they’ve been digitizing Saar’s expansive archive, including correspondence, sketches, playbills, documents and ephemera. Myriad ledgers record artworks and exhibitions alongside the income that sustained Saar and her then-young daughters — Alison, Lezley and Tracye — after her 1970 divorce from Richard Saar. At one point, they came upon previously unseen photographs from Saar’s early career as a costume mistress. Along with wardrobe sketches for productions at the Inner City Cultural Center, they found greeting cards, enamel jewelry and book and album covers made after she graduated from UCLA in 1949.
These materials — included in “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” at Roberts Projects through Aug. 22 — reveal an artist whose creations all flowed from the same restless imagination.
Saar traces her habit of rescuing discarded materials to her childhood. Born in L.A. in 1926, she was raised between Pasadena and Watts, where her paternal grandparents lived. Walking along the railroad tracks, she watched Simon Rodia build the Watts Towers’ 17 spires from rebar, shells, tiles, mirrors, soda bottles and cement. In Pasadena, Romani communities set up seasonal caravan camps, where Saar first encountered astrology and palmistry charts that inspired her interest in the unknown.
The mystical, however, was never separate from the social realities of midcentury L.A. Saar grew up in a partially segregated city and came of age in a society where Black women were expected to find practical work, not become artists. The Watts Rebellion and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. three years later sharpened the political force of her vision. She realized that the same symbolic language that could conjure dreams and spirits could also be used to confront racist advertising and the long shadow of slavery. “I was always asking myself,” says Saar, “‘Can I get away with this?’”
Alison remembers her mother collecting melted bottles and warped pans left by the Bel-Air fire that tore through Laurel Canyon shortly before the family relocated there. Drawn to the iridescent glass, Saar lined the artifacts on the fence and encouraged her daughters to keep an eye out, too. “They would come up from school with their pockets full of things to show me,” Saar recalls.
For Alison, the lesson went beyond scouring, although she acquired that skill, too. “These things survived the wrath of fire,” she says. “They persevered and were made beautiful by the vitrification.”
Along with keeping eyes on the ground, Saar passed along her compulsive will toward creation. Before she learned to speak, Alison says she learned to make things: “It was our first language.” Saar would often hire them as assistants in the studio, she explains: “We’d help her sew, or draw, or glue things together.”
These early lessons stuck. Not only are both Alison and Lezley accomplished visual artists, and Tracye a successful writer, but so are their respective children.
The actor CCH Pounder, Saar’s longtime friend and travel companion, attributes Saar’s ability to manage three children, a home, multiple paying jobs and an artistic practice of her own to a form of “mother wit.”
Whitley uses the same phrase to describe Saar’s preternatural sense of an object’s narrative potential. A few months ago at the Pasadena City College Swap Meet, Whitley watched Saar pass stall after stall, ignoring all the wrong blues and reds, until something suddenly caught her attention. “To see it in action,” Whitley says, “it feels otherworldly, almost magic. She knows exactly what she wants — and what she wants to pay for it.” Saar, she says, is still bargaining.
Even so, it is the act of assembling disparate icons and references into resonant wholes that affords Saar’s sculptures and tableaux their personal and political import.
“I don’t know a single Black girl who hasn’t had a profound connection to ‘Black Girl’s Window,’” says Whitley of Saar’s 1969 assemblage that features a silhouette of a Black figure pressing her hands — glittering with moons, stars and astrological signs — against a glass plane. “It’s both a self-portrait and a mirror in which a singular perspective can reach out to so many.”
Three years later, Saar created “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” the assemblage that activist Angela Davis credited with sparking the Black women’s movement. Saar took a smiling mammy figure and replaced the pencil a Black housekeeper would have used for her client’s grocery list with a rifle and grenade. The work doesn’t simply denounce a racist caricature; it changes the terms of its power, restoring the figure’s agency and turning her into a self-emancipating revolutionary.
In “Spirit Catcher” (1977), a towering wicker-and-bamboo structure is festooned with feathers, shells, tin charms, bones and reeds. To friend and filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the work appears as both a weapon, “armor for one’s interior world,” and a prayer. “It could be an image of Black womanhood: she brings the sacred and the strength that other people find dangerous into a beautiful harmony.” DuVernay recognizes a similar coexistence in the artist herself: “She has both curiosity and fire in her eyes and smile.”
That example has encouraged generations of upcoming artists. Lezley says she often hears from people who studied with Saar in the ‘80s or are studying her in their art history courses now. Some are famous, some, less so, but they all tell her some version of the same thing: Saar made them believe they could do it, too.
“She had what I call three strikes against her,” says curator Carol Eliel, who organized Saar’s 2019 LACMA exhibition “Betye Saar: Call and Response”: being a woman, being Black and being based in California when New York was the center of the art world. “But she stuck with her practice when she wasn’t getting accolades, wasn’t famous, and remained absolutely fearless in her willingness to take on the most significant challenges of our time.”
Saar has never stopped making, mothering or teaching. Maddy Inez describes the sketchbook regimen handed down from her grandmother. Saar’s dear friend, artist and jeweler Neil Lane, recalls how she taught him to collage: slowly layering papers with matte medium and, of course, saving every scrap.
According to Pounder, Saar has long understood that in life as in art, things take the time they take. On a trip to France, the two were walking along a cobblestone street lined with buildings overgrown with gray vines when Saar stopped and posed before the bare serpentine branches, arms above her head as if to form one of the leaves that was no longer there. She stopped again, asking each time to have her photo taken.
When Pounder questioned what she was doing, Saar explained: “This is going to be my last show after I’m gone. It’s called Fade.” She was in her 80s then.
Years later, Saar called Pounder. “I don’t think we’re going to be doing that show anytime soon,” she said. “I’m going to make it to 100.” Pounder still sounds stunned by it, smiling and shaking her head as she tells the story.
Back on the patio in Laurel Canyon, Saar rises from her seat on the lima-bean-shaped bench outside the wood door with the silver plaque that reads “entrée des artistes,” closes her eyes and tilts her face toward the sun. There are sketchbooks still to fill, assemblages missing one last red bottle, and a studio full of objects that have yet to be turned from one thing into another.
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