Betye Saar, a Founder of the Black Arts Movement in American Art, Has Died

Betye Saar, the American artist who built work about identity, resistance and memory out of discarded objects and racist imagery, died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles on Sunday. She was 99, only days short of her hundredth birthday. Saar was a defining figure of the Black Arts Movement and a pioneer of assemblage. Her best known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), sets a grinning mammy figure in a knotted headscarf and a loud floral dress against a wall of vintage pancake mix labels. She holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Saar later told NPR the piece was about a Black woman being treated both as a sexual object and as a domestic soldier. It began a series aimed at reclaiming demeaning images. Saar was born in 1926 in the Watts neighbourhood of Los Angeles. Her father died when she was five and she grew up in Pasadena with her mother, a seamstress. On visits back to Watts she watched Simon Rodia build the Watts Towers, pressing shards of plates, tools, even corn cobs into cement. That, she said, was where she began to become an assemblagist. She studied design at UCLA, designed greeting cards and jewellery for a time, then worked as a printmaker. She kept working in her home studio into her late nineties. Her work has been shown at LACMA, the Whitney and the ICA Miami, and the Museum of Modern Art gave her a solo show in 2019. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima belongs to the Berkeley Art Museum. Read more: https://www.npr.org/2006/12/28/6688207/life-is-a-collage-for-artist-betye-saar Look: https://smarthistory.org/betye-saar-liberation-aunt-jemima/

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