{"id":399246,"date":"2026-07-15T11:51:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:51:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399246\/"},"modified":"2026-07-15T11:51:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-15T11:51:10","slug":"betye-saar-portrait-of-the-artist-at-100","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/399246\/","title":{"rendered":"Betye Saar: Portrait of the artist at 100"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as always: in the studio.<\/p>\n

In a small, light-filled room near the top of the Laurel Canyon home where she\u2019s lived since 1962, Saar spends the morning filling sketchbooks with watercolors. Symbols that the pioneering assemblage artist has been \u201cremixing\u201d for more than seven decades \u2014 stars, moons, eyes, hands \u2014 emerge in vibrant washes of magenta, teal and her favored crepuscular blues.<\/p>\n

Later, sitting on an aluminum bench in one of her many-tiered patios, she flips between a blank page and another in which a serpent curves across a cerulean plane. \u201cThat\u2019s what art is,\u201d she says, flipping it again. \u201cMaking something where there was nothing.\u201d She arranges four painted notebook covers together on her lap, forming a collage. \u201cSee,\u201d she says, \u201cyou can use anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Betye Saar shares her watercolor sketchbooks at her home in Laurel Canyon. The artist still works on them daily.<\/p>\n

(Christina House\/Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

And she has. Since the late 1960s, Saar has transformed washboards, dolls, clocks, family photographs, racist memorabilia and other salvaged materials into emotionally charged assemblages now held in the permanent collections of more than 60 museums.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are certain people,\u201d says curator Zo\u00e9 Whitley, \u201cwho redefined what was a very narrow definition of American art, and Betye is absolutely one of them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saar\u2019s studio is packed with relics gathered from sidewalks and swap meets in L.A., and from trips to Marrakesh, Mexico, Nigeria, Haiti and Brazil. Antique globes are mixed with model boats, window panes, wooden masks and painted watermelons. Mercantile scales and rusted bird cages are scattered across crowded shelves. Neatly labeled drawers hold hand fans, plastic snakes, buttons, buckles.<\/p>\n

It can be difficult to distinguish where an arrangement ends and an assemblage begins. Materials, like symbols, are recycled across sculptures and tableaux in an inexhaustible loop.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Items inside artist Betye Saar\u2019s studio include and old globe and a box covered in collage. It can be difficult to tell when a group of items is part of her collection, or the beginning of a new assemblage.<\/p>\n

(Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

On a late June afternoon, Saar seems more interested in filling another sketchbook than in any settled assessment of her legacy. \u201cI\u2019m not interested in making things to show or sell in a gallery now,\u201d Saar says, adjusting her quilted cobalt vest. \u201cIt\u2019s for me, and the moment, and the pleasure of creating.\u201d<\/p>\n

For this reason, family and close friends such as longtime gallerist Julie Roberts have taken on the work of accounting. Since 2016, they\u2019ve been digitizing Saar\u2019s expansive archive, including correspondence, sketches, playbills, documents and ephemera. Myriad ledgers record artworks and exhibitions alongside the income that sustained Saar and her then-young daughters \u2014 Alison, Lezley and Tracye \u2014 after her 1970 divorce from Richard Saar. At one point, they came upon previously unseen photographs from Saar\u2019s early career as a costume mistress. Along with wardrobe sketches for productions at the Inner City Cultural Center, they found greeting cards, enamel jewelry and book and album covers made after she graduated from UCLA in 1949.<\/p>\n

These materials \u2014 included in \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,\u201d at Roberts Projects through Aug. 22 \u2014 reveal an artist whose creations all flowed from the same restless imagination.<\/p>\n

Saar traces her habit of rescuing discarded materials to her childhood. Born in L.A. in 1926, she was raised between Pasadena and Watts, where her paternal grandparents lived. Walking along the railroad tracks, she watched Simon Rodia build the Watts Towers\u2019 17 spires from rebar, shells, tiles, mirrors, soda bottles and cement. In Pasadena, Romani communities set up seasonal caravan camps, where Saar first encountered astrology and palmistry charts that inspired her interest in the unknown.<\/p>\n

\"An <\/p>\n

Artist Betye Saar at her home in Laurel Canyon. Saar will turn 100 on July 30 and still works on her creations every day.<\/p>\n

(Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

The mystical, however, was never separate from the social realities of midcentury L.A. Saar grew up in a partially segregated city and came of age in a society where Black women were expected to find practical work, not become artists. The Watts Rebellion and the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. three years later sharpened the political force of her vision. She realized that the same symbolic language that could conjure dreams and spirits could also be used to confront racist advertising and the long shadow of slavery. \u201cI was always asking myself,\u201d says Saar, \u201c\u2018Can I get away with this?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Alison remembers her mother collecting melted bottles and warped pans left by the Bel-Air fire that tore through Laurel Canyon shortly before the family relocated there. Drawn to the iridescent glass, Saar lined the artifacts on the fence and encouraged her daughters to keep an eye out, too. \u201cThey would come up from school with their pockets full of things to show me,\u201d Saar recalls.<\/p>\n

For Alison, the lesson went beyond scouring, although she acquired that skill, too. \u201cThese things survived the wrath of fire,\u201d she says. \u201cThey persevered and were made beautiful by the vitrification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Along with keeping eyes on the ground, Saar passed along her compulsive will toward creation. Before she learned to speak, Alison says she learned to make things: \u201cIt was our first language.\u201d Saar would often hire them as assistants in the studio, she explains: \u201cWe\u2019d help her sew, or draw, or glue things together.\u201d<\/p>\n

These early lessons stuck. Not only are both Alison and Lezley accomplished visual artists, and Tracye a successful writer, but so are their respective children.<\/p>\n

The actor CCH Pounder, Saar\u2019s longtime friend and travel companion, attributes Saar\u2019s ability to manage three children, a home, multiple paying jobs and an artistic practice of her own to a form of \u201cmother wit.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pieces <\/p>\n

Artist Betye Saar\u2019s home studio is filled with items she\u2019s collected from her travels around the world and from local swap meets.<\/p>\n

(Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

Whitley uses the same phrase to describe Saar\u2019s preternatural sense of an object\u2019s narrative potential. A few months ago at the Pasadena City College Swap Meet, Whitley watched Saar pass stall after stall, ignoring all the wrong blues and reds, until something suddenly caught her attention. \u201cTo see it in action,\u201d Whitley says, \u201cit feels otherworldly, almost magic. She knows exactly what she wants \u2014 and what she wants to pay for it.\u201d Saar, she says, is still bargaining.<\/p>\n

Even so, it is the act of assembling disparate icons and references into resonant wholes that affords Saar\u2019s sculptures and tableaux their personal and political import.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know a single Black girl who hasn\u2019t had a profound connection to \u2018Black Girl\u2019s Window,\u2019\u201d says Whitley of Saar\u2019s 1969 assemblage that features a silhouette of a Black figure pressing her hands \u2014 glittering with moons, stars and astrological signs \u2014 against a glass plane. \u201cIt\u2019s both a self-portrait and a mirror in which a singular perspective can reach out to so many.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three years later, Saar created \u201cThe Liberation of Aunt Jemima,\u201d the assemblage that activist Angela Davis credited with sparking the Black women\u2019s movement. Saar took a smiling mammy figure and replaced the pencil a Black housekeeper would have used for her client\u2019s grocery list with a rifle and grenade. The work doesn\u2019t simply denounce a racist caricature; it changes the terms of its power, restoring the figure\u2019s agency and turning her into a self-emancipating revolutionary.<\/p>\n

In \u201cSpirit Catcher\u201d (1977), a towering wicker-and-bamboo structure is festooned with feathers, shells, tin charms, bones and reeds. To friend and filmmaker Ava DuVernay, the work appears as both a weapon, \u201carmor for one\u2019s interior world,\u201d and a prayer. \u201cIt could be an image of Black womanhood: she brings the sacred and the strength that other people find dangerous into a beautiful harmony.\u201d DuVernay recognizes a similar coexistence in the artist herself: \u201cShe has both curiosity and fire in her eyes and smile.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Pieces <\/p>\n

Pieces of art rest against a wall in artist Betye Saar\u2019s home studio in Laurel Canyon.<\/p>\n

(Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

That example has encouraged generations of upcoming artists. Lezley says she often hears from people who studied with Saar in the \u201880s or are studying her in their art history courses now. Some are famous, some, less so, but they all tell her some version of the same thing: Saar made them believe they could do it, too.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe had what I call three strikes against her,\u201d says curator Carol Eliel, who organized Saar\u2019s 2019 LACMA exhibition \u201cBetye Saar: Call and Response\u201d: being a woman, being Black and being based in California when New York was the center of the art world. \u201cBut she stuck with her practice when she wasn\u2019t getting accolades, wasn\u2019t famous, and remained absolutely fearless in her willingness to take on the most significant challenges of our time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saar has never stopped making, mothering or teaching. Maddy Inez describes the sketchbook regimen handed down from her grandmother. Saar\u2019s dear friend, artist and jeweler Neil Lane, recalls how she taught him to collage: slowly layering papers with matte medium and, of course, saving every scrap.<\/p>\n

\"A <\/p>\n

Artist Betye Saar is credited for helping to pioneer the Black women\u2019s movement with her groundbreaking art.<\/p>\n

(Christina House \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n

According to Pounder, Saar has long understood that in life as in art, things take the time they take. On a trip to France, the two were walking along a cobblestone street lined with buildings overgrown with gray vines when Saar stopped and posed before the bare serpentine branches, arms above her head as if to form one of the leaves that was no longer there. She stopped again, asking each time to have her photo taken.<\/p>\n

When Pounder questioned what she was doing, Saar explained: \u201cThis is going to be my last show after I\u2019m gone. It\u2019s called Fade.\u201d She was in her 80s then.<\/p>\n

Years later, Saar called Pounder. \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re going to be doing that show anytime soon,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m going to make it to 100.\u201d Pounder still sounds stunned by it, smiling and shaking her head as she tells the story.<\/p>\n

Back on the patio in Laurel Canyon, Saar rises from her seat on the lima-bean-shaped bench outside the wood door with the silver plaque that reads \u201centr\u00e9e des artistes,\u201d closes her eyes and tilts her face toward the sun. There are sketchbooks still to fill, assemblages missing one last red bottle, and a studio full of objects that have yet to be turned from one thing into another.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":399247,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[160301,2308,12837,160300,87616,8268,160305,24710,48,52,51,160304,47,50,49,9488,126393,160303,4610,160302,1968],"class_list":["post-399246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-alison","tag-art","tag-artist","tag-assemblage","tag-betye-saar","tag-eye","tag-family-photograph","tag-hand","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-lezley","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-material","tag-saar","tag-sketchbook","tag-thing","tag-whitley","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=399246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/399246\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/399247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=399246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=399246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=399246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}