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Can you name five women artists? Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has been asking this question on social media each March during Women's History Month using the hashtag…#5WomenArtists 2020: Betye Saar
Artist Betye Saar
Can you name five women artists?
Since 2016, the National Museum of Women in the Arts has been asking this question on social media each March during Women's History Month using the hashtag #5WomenArtists. The campaign calls attention to the fact that women have historically not been treated equally in the art world, and remain dramatically underrepresented and undervalued in today's museums, galleries, and auction houses.
Black women are doubly underrepresented in this context, often absent from America's museums and erased from the art world's memory. To address these disparities, CAAM will be sharing biographies of five women artists who have shown at the museum.
Betye Saar
Few artists have been as emblematic of their time and place for as long 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--her eras have not. The LA of 1926 is not the LA of 1947, 1962, 1972, or 2019, but Saar found ways to remain vital throughout. The towering sculptor's career arcs across seven decades (the nonagenarian is still showing and making work), a run that 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.
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Rhythm & Blues, 2010
Mixed media assemblage
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Betye Saar - CAGE, 2010 (Installation view)
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. Saar 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.
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 recently featured in two recent CAAM exhibitions, Dust My Broom - Southern Vernacular from the Permanent Collection and LA Blacksmith.
To learn more about Betye Saar's life and work, read #blackhistory: On July 30, 1926, legendary artist Betye Saar was born.
<strong>#5WomenArtists 2020</strong>