Betye Saar Analysis

Betye Saar was born on July 30, 1926. Her parents were Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Brown. She lived in Los Angeles, California with her family in the earlier childhood years of her life. Her father died from kidney failure when she was five years old. Her mother and her two siblings all moved to Pasadena, where they lived with Saar's great-aunt, Hattie Keys. Her mother started working as a seamstress to support the family. Her mother often made ends meet by recycling scraps of materials to create things her children needed. Economical use of everyday materials may have served as an inspiration in Saar's later works of art.

Saar grew up during the Great Depression and her family learned the value of things others might have taken

for granted. As a child, Saar often spent summers with her grandmother. During these summers, Saar, and her siblings would go treasure-hunting in her grandmother's backyard. They collected items such as bottle caps, feathers, buttons and broken glass. Saar would make dolls, puppets and gifts for her family with the items found on the treasure-hunts. It was early on that she began to acquire her devotion to the power that art has to recover meaning from the old. She also discovered the work of folk artist Simon Rodia while with her grandmother. Saar watched Rodia create the famous Watts Towers out of concrete, broken glass, scraps of metal and other assorted items while on trips to the market with her grandmother. Saar thought the Towers were magical and later described them as a strong influence on her work which is rooted in collage.
Betye Saar began her formal art training in 1945. She was a design major at UCLA where she focused on design and greeting cards. She graduated in 1949 with a bachelor’s in design, and then started working as a social worker. She continued to pursue design while she started her career as a social worker. On September 16, 1952 she married Richard Saar. Richard was a white American who worked in art design and manufacturing. They had three children, Lezley, Alison and Tracey. They later divorced in 1968. In 1958, Saar returned to school to pursue a teaching career and graduated from California State University at Long Beach in 1962. Saar was introduced to print making at CSU. Throughout the 1960s Saar focused her artistic talents on printmaking, featuring aspects of mysticism seen in her works, Mystic Window for Leo (1966) and The House of Tarot (1968). Assemblage is a composition made from scraps, junk, and odds and ends. Saar was inspired to try assemblage art, and she found that it allowed her to reconnect with her earlier childhood interests.
By the end of the 1960s, Saar's art work moved into a different direction. She was very influenced by the Civil Rights movement. Saar began to utilize assemblage to express her view on America's racial prejudices. Saar explains in an interview, "As a mother of three I couldn't participate directly in the Civil Rights movement, so I used my art to contribute to the movement." Betye Saar was influenced by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Civil Rights movement and African American folklore, in 1972 she created her break though work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. Aunt Jemima quickly became her signature piece. Aunt Jemima was a degrading representation of the African American woman which had been exploited to sell various products. Saar was addressing the derogatory images of black women with this piece. She reversed this stereotype by adding objects of empowerment. In Saar's image Aunt Jemima holds a rifle in one hand, and a broom in the other with a pistol tucked under her arm. Throughout the 1970s, she focused her art on challenging racial stereotypes and making political statements with works such as I've Got Rhythm and Mama's Little Coal Black Rose.
Over the last thirty years Saar's work has focused on the past, stereotypes, oppression, and mysticism. Betye Saar has participated in many solo and group exhibits in countries all over the world. Her work is in permanent collections at the High Museum in Atlanta, the Hirshorn Collection in Naples, Florida, the Oakland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and others. In the 1990s Saar and her daughter Alison, were the featured in two videos, "Similar Differences: Betye and Alison Saar" and "Betye and Alison Saar: Conjure Women of the Arts." Saar still creates art in her studio and sometimes collaborates with her daughters Alison and Tracey.
Some of her different works include Equality, Pour Vous Madame, Grandma’s House, Keep for Old Memoirs, Eye of the Beholder, Long Memory, Search for Solitude, and Survival of the Spirit.

Equality (1999) is a mixed media assemblage. Equality shows Aunt Jemima as the media had portrayed the African American woman with the word equality. Saar is showing that even the so-called Aunt Jemima needs equality. Equality is supposed to be for everyone and this piece illustrates that great truth. Pour Vous Madame (1999) is a mixed media assemblage. The title of this piece is French for “For you ma’am.” This work shows two servants and one is handing grenades to the other. This artwork is a direct satire of the age of slavery in American. The piece is symbolizing empowerment to all African American people. Grandma’s house (1972) pays homage to Saar’s grandmother. Saar spent summers with her grandmother when she was young and it was there that she found a lot inspiration for her art work. Keep for Old Memoirs (1976) is a mixed media assemblage. Saar was famous for making collages from things that she had found. She would collect things that she found at in her grandmother’s yard when she was young and make gifts for her family. The joy that she got from doing this carried over to many of her artistic pieces such as this one. Eye of the Beholder (1994) is a mixed media artwork. This piece is visual form of the old adage “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Historically, African American people were not considered beautiful or handsome and this dates back to early European monarchies. Europeans thought that pale skin and light hair was the only real form of beauty. Saar is challenging this ancient and misguided belief about beauty. Long Memory (1994) is a mixed media work. This piece demonstrates that African Americans have had a very long and rough past that included slavery and prejudice. Unfortunately, a lot of prejudice still exists in today’s society. The hand in this

piece is reaching toward a brighter future. Search for Solitude (1994) is another one of Saar’s many mixed media works. The piece was very interesting because it portrays that Saar and most likely other African Americans are seeking a calm place (literal or figurative) to get some peace and time away from the world in which we dwell. Survival of the Spirit (1993) is a very fascinating piece of artwork. This piece shows a dragon that is a lot like the ones seen in Japanese culture. The dragon can mean a number of things in Japanese culture some examples include fertility, humility, procreation and warding off evil spirits. Perhaps she is capturing some of those meanings and using them as things that could keep one’s spirit thriving.
Betye Irene Saar has spent more than five decades creating works of art that critique forms of racism and sexism while simultaneously pointing toward the categories that divide people. Saar has gained international notoriety for her work in printmaking, collage, and assemblage.