#blackhistory: On July 30, 1926, legendary artist Betye Saar was born

Few artists have been as emblematic of their time and place as Betye Saar. While her geography has technically remained the same—Saar (née Brown) was born in Los Angeles on July 30, 1926, and has lived in its environs ever since—she has found a way to remain engaged and vital throughout her region's many eras. The LA of 1926 is not the LA of 1947, 1962, 1972, or 2019, but her creative contributions are every moment's one creative certainty.

The towering sculptor's career arcs across seven decades, and the nonagenarian is still showing and making work. This run has seen Saar play central roles in multiple artistic movements, from post-war Black nationalist art, to second-wave feminist art, to West Coast assemblage.

Her parents, Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson, met at UCLA, and her family—mother, father, Betye, and two siblings—lived in Watts for a while with her paternal grandmother. She remembers seeing Simon Rodia working on his towers and being transformed:

Right away, I was curious. I was a kid with a lot of imagination – especially fascinated by fairy tales, magic, things like that – and I always wondered what was going on there. <i>The Watts Towers</i> were a strong influence on my work because Rodia used all sorts to make them: iron and steel for the structure, cement, shards. Everything that was thrown away, he recycled. Making art out of nothing – the Watts Towers were where I learned how to be an artist.

She would have further apprenticeships in Pasadena, where her family lived with a beloved, maternal great-aunt, Hattie Parson Keys. There, Saar's signature interest in making meaning of out of material chaos made its initial appearance. Inspired by Parson Keys' assiduously maintained collection of family photographs, letters, and documents, young Betye began to keep careful accountings of her toys, clothes, and books. She also began collecting small items that felt invested with a certain child-sized mystery: irregularly shaped stones and unexpected leaves, stray swaths of cloth.

For all that Saar gathered in Pasadena, she also suffered losses there.  Her father died when she was just five, an early rupture she spoken of spending a lifetime trying to mend.

"A lot of my works are about sadness," she says. "The materials I use are also dead, secondhand materials which have been discarded by their original owner."

Her path to that way of art-making began at Pasadena City College, where Saar studied before earning her B.A. in interior design from UCLA 1947. Black women of that era didn't study to become artists, she told the Los Angeles Times' Carolina Miranda in 2016, "but I could tell people how to buy curtains."

While plying her trade as a designer—she cofounded a decorative arts business in the early 1950s with jewelry designer Curtis Tann called Brown and Tann—she continued to pursue graduate and post-graduate studies at California State University, Long Beach, University of Southern California, California State University, Northridge, and the American Film Institute. She also married a white fellow-artist named Richard Saar during that period, this almost two decades before Loving v. Virginia. Betye and Richard Saar would have three daughters: Alison and Lezley (themselves artists), followed by Tracey.

In 1962, the family moved to the countercultural bastion of Laurel Canyon. Saar recalls those gestational years as rich in community and possibility, if not material things:

My community was Tony Hill, who made ceramics; the painter William Pajaud, who died [in 2015]; Curtis [Tann]; and, later, Charles [White]. Art exhibitions were held on a weekend, maybe at a social club. There would be a concert or a singer, perhaps, and artists were invited to show their work. At the time, I was a print­maker – intaglio, etchings, serigraphs. Most of the content of my work was mystical: palmistry charts, phrenology, astrological things, signs and symbols. When I started making assemblages, I included my own prints in the pieces.

There weren't that many houses in Laurel Canyon when we arrived. On the corner of my street is a log cabin where Frank Zappa used to live. The hill section was part of the hippie movement; not that I was really a hippie, because I was a mother with three kids, but we went to love-ins and things like that. Life was always kind of loose anyway because my husband, Richard Saar, was also an artist. He had a company called Saar Ceramics. We made just enough money to pay our rent and keep going.

Ever attentive to her moment, Saar's work took mirrored aesthetic and political turns in the mid-to-late 1960s. Already experimenting with the creation of layered sculptural pieces that mixed photography, her own prints and found objects, the Watts rebellion and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. led her into new thematic territory:

In Black Girl's Window (1969), a significant marker of this moment, Saar uses the window as a formal device to explore the effects of race both personally and conceptually. Cosmo­logical elements (stars, the sun, a crescent moon) and pictorial emblems (a skeleton and a roaring lion, among others) in Black Girl's Window also reflect Saar's turn toward mysti­cal iconography, which she describes as a pursuit of "occult atmosphere" in her work.

Her work took its most explicitly political turn with 1972's Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which put a gun in Jemima's hand to go with her broom. As she describes it, "Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which I made in 1972, was the first piece that was politically explicit:"

There was a community center in Berkeley, on the edge of Black Panther territory in Oakland, called the Rainbow Sign. They issued an open invitation to black artists to be in a show about black heroes, so I decided to make a black heroine. For many years, I had collected derogatory images: postcards, a cigar-box label, an ad for beans, Darkie toothpaste. I found a little Aunt Jemima mammy figure, a caricature of a black slave, like those later used to advertise pancakes. She had a broom in one hand and, on the other side, I gave her a rifle. In front of her, I placed a little postcard, of a mammy with a mulatto child, which is another way black women were exploited during slavery. I used the derogatory image to empower the black woman by making her a revolutionary, like she was rebelling against her past enslavement. When my work was included in the exhibition' WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution', at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007, the activist and academic Angela Davis gave a talk in which she said the black women's movement started with my work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. That was a real thrill.

Just a few years later, Saar's national and international reputation would be made with a 1975 a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Saar has had a long association with CAAM. In addition to having many of her pieces in its permanent collection, CAAM has exhibited her work on multiple occasions, including 2012's Places of Validation, Art and Progression, 2016's Reflections on the Self - Selections from the Permanent Collection, and 2017's We Wanted a Revolution - Black Radical Women, 1965–85.

Saar was also the subject of the 2011 solo show Betye Saar - CAGE. A New Series of Assemblages and Collages popup: yes.

Her work was also featured in the fall of 2019 in two CAAM shows, Dust My Broom - Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection and LA Blacksmith.

(image: betty5.jpg caption: Rhythm & Blues,  Mixed media assemblage 2010)

(image: bettys2.jpg caption: Installation view, Betye Saar - CAGE. A New Series of Assemblages and Collages)