Betye Saar, Pioneering Assemblage Artist Who Powerfully Tackled Racism, Dies at 99 

Betye Saar, the Los Angeles–based artist whose assemblages powerfully tackled the brutality of racism and anti-Blackness and the stereotypes they engender, died in her sleep in the early hours of Sunday, July 26, her gallery Robert Projects announced. She was 99 years old, and just four days shy of turning 100 on July 30. 

Across seven decades, Saar created a body of work that used a wide variety of materials—often found objects like furniture, statuettes, feathers, and more—and arranged them in such a way that helped give them new meaning, all the while elucidating the pervasiveness of racism in the US.

Her most famous work is arguably The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). At the center of the work is a racist “mammy” statuette who holds a broom. She stands on a bed of cotton, and embedded in her torso is a painting of a similar mammy figure holding a white child over which Saar has painted a Black power fist. Most shockingly, though, Saar has given this figure, a trope of a Black woman, a rifle and a pistol. She is going to liberate herself at all costs, Saar suggests.  

The background features tiled images of Aunt Jemima, who once graced the boxes of pancake mix and syrup bottles before Quaker Oats changed the name of the brand in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter protests that roiled the world. Saar made the work for the 1972 exhibition “Black Heroes” at the Rainbow Sign Cultural Center, Berkeley, California, which was organized as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. 

“My artistic practice has always been the lens through which I have seen and moved through the world around me. It continues to be an arena and medium for political protest and social activism,” Saar told ARTnews in 2020, reflecting on the Quaker Oats announcement. “This work allowed me to channel my righteous anger at not only the great loss of MLK Jr., but at the lack of representation of black artists, especially black women artists. I transformed the derogatory image of Aunt Jemima into a female warrior figure, fighting for Black liberation and women’s rights. Fifty years later she has finally been liberated herself. And, yet more work still needs to be done.”

Other works would similarly tackle the history of enslavement and the decades of oppression faced by Black people in the decades after the end of slavery in the US in 1865. One of her earliest mixed-media works is 1966’s The Phrenologist’s Window, which used the framing device of a window, which Saar once described as “a way to travel from one level of consciousness to another.” Embedded in that window, however, are depictions of the human skull according to phrenology, the discredited pseudoscience that was used to argue for the superiority of white people over Black people because of the measurements of their skulls. 

Still other works would employ common metaphors, like birdcages for slavery or birds for the Jim Crow era, or make use of the cash crops that the slavery economy relied on, like cotton and indigo. Eventually, her work would become more ambitious in scale as she waded into making installations, like I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), which is currently on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s David Geffen Galleries. This powerful work seems innocuous at first sight: a wooden ironing board stands in front of a freshly pressed sheet. Upon closer inspection, viewers see that the ironing board has been emblazoned with a reproduction of an 18th-century print showing how captured Africans were densely packed into slave ships during the Middle Passage. That white sheet is embroidered with “K.K.K.,” referring to the Ku Klux Klan, a racist organization that has terrorized Black people at various points in history. 

“She took assemblage in a new direction,” curator Zoé Whitley previously told ARTnews. “Betye was able to see the world and then distill it into assemblage.” 

In a 2019 profile in Art in America, writer Leah Ollman described Saar’s studio as “a space defined by accretion, layering, conjunction, and disjunction, an organized ingathering of handled objects, worn surfaces, and burnished meanings. A specific temporality adheres to each shelved and piled item, but a broader, more expansive notion of time unifies them all.” She organized her materials by type, saying “Here’s metal. There’s wood. And there is rust. I want to do an installation about rust called ‘Insomniac,’ because rust never sleeps.” 

Many of those heaps of items were ones that Saar had collected over the years. Often Saar would scour flea markets, antique shops, and other stores containing items from years ago, with the intention that one day they would factor into one of her assemblages. Even into her 90s, she would still often go there to source new materials, even if not as frequently. “I fell in love with going to flea markets and thrift stores a long time ago,” Saar told A.i.A. “I don’t go so often now, because I have plenty of stuff here. But sometimes you see something and you just can’t refuse it. It may take twenty-five years to use it. It will just sit here until I’m ready.” 

Saar’s accumulation of these objects, usually Black memorabilia with varying degrees of racism embedded in their imagery, was key to the art she made. In the A.i.A profile, she recalled a friend collecting derogatory postcards in the 1960s, thinking to herself, “this is really nasty, this is mean.” She quickly came to the realization that not only were these caricatures how white people have perceived Black people, but if these were the only images that existed, then that’s how Black people might perceive themselves too. 

But, like Aunt Jeminma, perhaps these objects could be liberated from that history. There lay endless possibilities: to reframe them and break them from the tropes and stereotypes embedded in them. Soon, her practice would become animated by a guiding question, “In a way, it’s like, slavery was over, but they will keep you a slave by making you a salt shaker. I said to myself, if black people only see things like this reproduced, how can they aspire to anything else?” 

Saar was born Betye Irene Brown in a then-predominantly Black neighborhood of Hollywood in Los Angeles on July 30, 1926. She is the oldest of three children to parents Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson, who were of mixed African, Native American, and Irish heritage. Not long before her father died when she was only six, she moved to Pasadena, according to her oral history transcribed for a UCLA research project. After his death, the family lived with Saar’s maternal aunt, Hattie Parson Keys, who became the subject of Saar’s future collages. Her mother later remarried and had two more children.

Saar’s mother, who was a seamstress, encouraged her daughter to sew and try her hand at craftwork, while Saar’s father, with whom she had been close, was a poet, though he worked a day job as a secretary for a local YMCA before selling life insurance. “Both myself and my sister, my children, my daughters, and my mom, we’re project-oriented,” Saar said in her oral history recording from the 1990s. “We always have a project, something to do with our hands.” 

As a child, Saar was also fascinated by the artist Simon Rodia’s famous Watts Towers, which she watched as they were being built, while visiting her late father’s family. “That was a really important thing, because that was a dedicated artist,” she said of the experience in her oral history. “But he wasn’t saying, “Hey, I’m going to build this monument and make this.” He just started puttering around and did– I never saw him, but I saw these spires. And because it triggered my imagination–they were like fairy castles or something very mysterious– So as a kid I was drawn to mystery and sort of the unexplainable and strange things. Just really, really somehow connected with fairy tales and that sort of a mysterious thing, too.”

Saar eventually studied at Pasadena City College and then transferred to UCLA in 1947, where she majored in design, earning her bachelor’s degree in 1949. In a 1975 interview published in The Feminist Journal, she told art historian Cindy Nemser that the reason she chose design was because “blacks [at the time] were not particularly encouraged in the arts.” While simultaneously working as a social worker, Saar initially pursued becoming an interior decorator, designing greeting cards, enameled home accessories, and jewelry.

Through her work selling and exhibiting design objects with collaborator Curtis Tann, with whom she co-founded a studio named Brown and Tann, she soon met other local artists, including a ceramicist named Richard Saar. The two married in 1952 and had three daughters, two of whom, Lezley and Alison, are professional artists. In the early 1960’s the family moved to Laurel Canyon, where they rubbed shoulders with the likes of Frank Zappa, and the Los Angeles hippie scene. 

When she started making art at 35 in the early 1960s, Saar’s work was informed more by a sense of spirituality and family history. One such early work is Black Girl’s Window. (1969), which reuses the window motif as its armature from The Phrenologist’s Window. In an interview about the work with the Museum of Modern Art, which owns the work, Saar characterized it as “a diary of my life”: moons, stars, and the sun because “I really love the sky”; a couple dancing in a greeting card from the 1920s or ’30s for her parents; a lion for her astrological sign; a daguerreotype for the unknown ancestry of maternal grandfather; a phrenology chart; and at the bottom a silhouette for Saar. 

At the center of the composition is a skeleton to represent her father’s untimely passing. “He had an infection and the hospital in Pasadena was segregated and he had to drive to a county hospital, which was the only kind of medical care black people had,” she said, noting that this picture of death “is the way I interpret his passing. I find it curious at this time that it’s in the center of the window, but because he had such a rude way of dying, I had issues with racism and with with segregation.” To put it simply, she concluded, “That’s Black Girl’s Window. It’s about life, and about death.” 

Over the course of her career, she has shown consistently in the US, having gallery shows in Los Angeles since 1964. She also had early institution support with solos at the Whitney Museum in New York (in 1975), the Wadsworth Atheneum in Connecticut (1976), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1977), the Studio Museum in Harlem (1980). She has also featured in important group exhibitions, like “WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, 1965-1980” (2007) and “Under the Big Black Sun” (2012), both at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, as well as “We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965 – 85,” which debuted at the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 before going on a national tour. 

As part of her centennial celebrations, her work is also currently on view at the Huntington in San Marino, California, the New York Historical, and Roberts Projects. 

Though she has always been a towering figure in the LA art scene, over the past several years, Saar has experienced a late-career revival on an international scale. In 2019, when she was the subject of solo shows at both the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, she received the €100,000 (about $110,000 then) Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany. At the time, the museum’s director Yilmaz Dziewior said, comparing her profile in the US, “In Europe, by contrast, her work is still far too little known. It is our stated goal to change this and finally give the artist the attention she deserves.” 

One exhibition that helped to draw attention to Saar’s work abroad was “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which opened at Tate Modern in London in 2017. The lauded exhibition helped draw renewed interest to the careers of dozens of Black artists whose work had long been overlooked by the canon, and it featured The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, alongside other works like Mti (1973), House of the Head (1971), and Eshu (The Trickster), 1971. 

When asked by ARTnews what she made of showing her work in the current political climate, Saar said, “Well, I’m pretty matter of fact: I just make the work. How I’m selected to the show really depends on the mentality and the opinion of the curator. I make the art about things that I feel strongly about …. [O]nce I make the work and put it out there, I’ve moved onto something else. I’m not even thinking about that anymore.

As she neared the end of her life, Saar began to think about her legacy. In 2018, when the Getty Research Institute launched the African American Art History Initiative with $5 million, the first thing it did was acquire Saar’s archives. “‘Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without’ was a common saying during my childhood,” Saar said at the time. “I am very pleased that the Getty Research Institute shares my desire for ‘saving things’ and that they will be providing a home for many of my collections so that they will be accessible by scholars, the arts community, and the generally curious alike.” 

The following year, Saar announced the launch of the Betye Saar Legacy Group, for which she sent nine curators handwritten notes thanking them for the scholarship they had produced on her work and to help her create a “resource for future generations—curators, researchers, writers, and art historians—helping them connect with the heart of my practice.” All the curators said yes, with Zoé Whitley, who is writing Saar’s biography, saying, “It’s an amazing opportunity, and also daunting: how do you cover nearly a century of someone’s life?”

The Saar Legacy Group, its founder made clear, is not meant to stand-in for Saar’s estate or serve as a retrospective or biography, but as a way for “next generations—future generations when she’s not around—to still be able to speak about her work in such a way that they respect her wishes,” her dealer Julie Roberts said at the time. 

“It’s looking to the future of what Tracye and I will need to carry us forward,” Roberts said, referring to Saar’s daughter Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, who is leading the Legacy Group, alongside her sisters, artists Lezley Saar and Alison Saar. They survive Saar, alongside six grandchildren and, as a release notes, “her red footed tortoise Rojo.”

In Los Angeles, Saar has always been a hometown hero, known for her graciousness, her generosity of spirit, and her unending creativity—even if it took decades for some to catch on. Asked in 2020 by CBS whether wider recognition felt different to her, she didn’t hesitate in response. “No,” she said. “Only a few more aches and pains because I’m older, but the creative part of me is forever young.”