Women Artist ABCs: Betye Saar

Happy #WomensHistoryMonth! You don't have to visit the museum to learn more about women artists changing the world- you can enjoy #artwhereyouare through #museumfromhome. Outsight is starting a series of blog posts about women artists through the alphabet! B is for...

Betye Saar was born in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1926. She studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles—a career path frequently foisted upon women of color who were interested in the arts, due to the racism and sexism prevalent in universities at the time. Her work deals with spirituality, cosmology, and family.

In the 1969 “Black Girl’s Window", she surrounds a silhouette of her head with floating moons and stars; an etching of a lion, her birth sign; a tintype of a woman who could be her Irish grandmother; and, at the center, a skeleton alluding to her father’s death. Her art also addresses race and contemporary events. A famous, indeed career-defining example, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” from 1972, was her response to the killing of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Watts riots. Saar made steady initial headway in a male-dominated Black Power movement and a white-dominated feminist movement. She is the mother of sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist Alison Saar. In addition to their distinguished separate careers, Alison and Betye Saar have produced artworks together.

Black Girl’s Window, 1969 / Betye in front of Anticipation, 1961 / Mother and Children in Blue, 1998

top illustration by Emily Cronin