{"id":1842287,"date":"2026-07-28T00:17:58","date_gmt":"2026-07-28T00:17:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1842287"},"modified":"2026-07-28T00:17:58","modified_gmt":"2026-07-28T00:17:58","slug":"betye-saar-dead-assemblage-artist-liberated-aunt-jemima","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/betye-saar-dead-assemblage-artist-liberated-aunt-jemima\/","title":{"rendered":"Betye Saar dead: Assemblage artist \u2018liberated\u2019 Aunt Jemima"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Betye Saar, a Los Angeles artist who transformed collections of bigoted bric-a-brac \u2014 Sambo dolls, ceramic mammies and crude renderings of pickaninnies \u2014 into potent works of assemblage that mined the searing history of race in the United States, and whose works influenced generations of artists, has died. She was 99.<\/p>\n

Saar died in her sleep \u2014 just a few days short of her 100th birthday \u2014 in Los Angeles, her longtime gallerist Julie Roberts at Roberts Projects said. Saar\u2019s death was confirmed by her publicist Hannah Gottlieb-Graham.<\/p>\n

\u201cBetye Saar was one of the greatest artists of our time, and it has been an immense honor to work with her for nearly 20 years,\u201d Roberts said. \u201cHer singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art, and her legacy will continue to inspire generations of artists, scholars, and audiences around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

A diminutive woman with a low-key manner that belied a steely resolve, Saar was known for combing garage sales, flea markets and junk piles for objects that she employed in collages and assemblages large and small. These explored difficult aspects of American history \u2014 including slavery and Jim Crow \u2014 but also touched on more personal themes of family, memory, magic and spirituality.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy work has to do with recycling,\u201d she told a documentary crew in the 1970s. \u201cEach item I collect has a certain energy from its previous function that carries over into its new use.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Artist Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon home in 2016.<\/p>\n

(Gina Ferazzi \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In a 1984 profile, Times art writer Suzanne Muchnic described Saar as an artist who used found objects in a way that \u201cdraws on the power of mystery, the hurt of discrimination and the authenticity of individual vision.\u201d<\/p>\n

As Saar\u2019s 100th birthday approached, her work and its groundbreaking importance were celebrated afresh in a slew of articles, including two recent profiles<\/a> in The Times<\/a>. As she neared the momentous milestone, Saar appeared more interested in creating new art than in dissecting her legacy. \u201cThat\u2019s what art is,\u201d she told The Times in an interview in late June. \u201cMaking something where there was nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saar first rose to prominence in the 1970s, after crafting a small assemblage \u2014 roughly the size of a shoebox \u2014 that featured at its center a stereotypical Black mammy figurine bearing a rifle in one hand and a grenade in the other. The piece was first shown at the Rainbow Sign, a community center in Berkeley that was located near the headquarters of the Black Panthers.<\/p>\n

The artist had begun her professional life as a designer of greeting cards and home accessories. But 1972\u2019s \u201cThe Liberation of Aunt Jemima,\u201d as the assemblage was called, catapulted her into the center of the Black Arts Movement and connected her with a broader tradition of assemblage in California and the art world at large. Three years after its creation, she had a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Decades later, activist Angela Davis credited \u201cThe Liberation of Aunt Jemima\u201d with spurring the Black women\u2019s movement.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s like they abolished slavery, but they kept Black people in the kitchen as mammy jars,\u201d Saar said in a 2015 interview. \u201cI had this Aunt Jemima, and I wanted to put a rifle and a grenade under her skirts. I wanted to empower her. I wanted to make her a warrior. I wanted people to know that Black people wouldn\u2019t be enslaved by that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In June 2020, in the wake of the uprisings following the murder of George Floyd, Quaker Oats announced that it would retire the Aunt Jemima brand. Saar took to Instagram<\/a> with an image of her famous work and a message: \u201cShe\u2019s liberated! Finally at long last! And it\u2019s about time!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cLiberation\u201d now resides in the collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, not far from where it was first shown.<\/p>\n

Betye Saar was born Betye Irene Brown in L.A. on July 30, 1926, the eldest of Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson\u2018s three children. Her father, with whom she was close, died when Saar was about 5. And shortly thereafter, Parson relocated the family to Pasadena to live with her maternal aunt, Hattie Parson Keys. (Years later, Saar created a series of works in honor of Keys, employing objects that her aunt had left behind \u2014 something she would do for other family members as well.)<\/p>\n

Saar\u2019s parents weren\u2019t artists, but art was in the air. When she was a child, her mother encouraged her to sew and make crafts. And, in the summers, she spent time at the home of her paternal grandparents in Watts, where she saw Simon Rodia building the Watts Towers and was struck by his use of materials.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe one I find the most amusing is the corn cob,\u201d she told the podcast \u201cThe Modern Art Notes\u201d<\/a> in 2016. \u201cHe had a piece of space with wet cement so he just put the corn cob in there. And I just love the kind of freedom to make the piece. Anything can go in there.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from high school, Saar spent two years at Pasadena City College before transferring to UCLA in 1947. She majored in design, figuring that she would become an interior decorator \u2014 and, for a time, she did indeed work in that field, teaming up with Curtis Tann to form a cleverly named studio called Brown and Tann. Operating out of Tann\u2019s home, the company produced an array of decorative and functional objects, including bowls, ashtrays and jewelry.<\/p>\n

To market their goods, they turned to an informal network of African American artists, staging pop-up exhibitions in people\u2019s homes and in other impromptu locations. In 1951, the pair was featured in Ebony magazine.<\/p>\n

It was through that circle that she met a ceramicist of German American descent by the name of Richard Saar. In 1952, they married. The following year, their daughter Lezley was born. Two other daughters followed: Alison in 1956 and Tracye in 1961. (Lezley and Alison are now respected artists in their own right. And, in fact, on more than one occasion, all three women have shown their work together, most recently at the Museum of Art & History<\/a> in Lancaster in 2018.) In 2024, the Equal Justice Initiative Legacy Gallery installed Saar\u2019s \u201cSeeking Secrets of Destiny\u201d alongside her daughter Alison\u2019s sculpture \u201cThe Beckoning.\u201d <\/p>\n

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Betye Saar, flanked by her daughters, stands before a painted brick wall.<\/p>\n

(Carolina A. Miranda \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In 1962, the Saar family moved to a rambling hillside home in Laurel Canyon, then a very rustic part of L.A. It put them in a hotbed of hippiedom right as the 1960s got rolling.<\/p>\n

\u201cDown the road was Frank Zappa,\u201d Saar recalled in one interview<\/a>. \u201cThere weren\u2019t that many houses. We had the long skirts and long hair, and it was very casual. You\u2019d go to a love-in or a concert.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were as hippie-ish as hippie could be, while still being responsible.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the late \u201860s, she and Saar had divorced. But she remained in Laurel Canyon, where she would live and work until the end of her life.<\/p>\n

Saar came to art almost by accident. In the late 1950s, she enrolled at Cal State Long Beach to pursue a master\u2019s degree so that she could teach. But a stroll through campus led her past the university\u2019s printing department.<\/p>\n

\u201cI walked past the print workshop and I was like, \u2018Heyyy!\u2019 \u201d she later recalled.<\/p>\n

The master\u2019s degree never happened. Instead, she poured herself into printing.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved making prints,\u201d she recalled. \u201cThe move into fine art, it was liberating. It gave me freedom to experiment.\u201d<\/p>\n

A pair of other, longer journeys, also proved formative.<\/p>\n

There was a trip to Chicago\u2019s Field Museum, where she immersed herself in the institution\u2019s extensive collection of African art, followed by a trip to Haiti in the early 1970s. Saar was drawn to the Caribbean nation because of her interest in voodoo and magic \u2014 and the power that these could confer on inanimate objects.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the early 1960s I began going to coffee houses and they\u2019d have books on the occult,\u201d she told the New York Times<\/a> in 1978. \u201cI was attracted to signs and diagrams of alchemy and palmistry, and I began to use them in my prints. I also haunted second-hand and junk stores, and I started to frame my prints in old window frames.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was a visit to an exhibition of the work of Joseph Cornell<\/a> at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Musuem) that inspired her to take a three-dimensional turn in her work. Saar was moved by the surreal qualities of the New York artist\u2019s intimately scaled assemblages<\/a>, which were often presented in small boxes.<\/p>\n

\u201cI immediately started collecting stuff after I saw that show,\u201d she told the L.A. Times<\/a> in 2016. \u201cI started going to yard sales and estate sales.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the \u201860s and \u201870s, she took on a series of part-time jobs to provide for her children, designing costumes at a cultural center and teaching at area art schools. These provided her with necessary income, but also allowed her enough time to make work \u2014 which she often did at the kitchen table.<\/p>\n

Saar\u2019s creations from that era are on display through Aug. 22 at Roberts Projects. Titled, \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,\u201d<\/a> the show covers the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center\u2019s<\/a> theatrical productions.<\/p>\n

\u201cArt comes from the heart and the head,\u201d she once said. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to have a separate space in which to make it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Plus, art gave Saar a crucial political voice at a time of the civil rights and Black power movements. \u201cIf you are a mom with three kids, you can\u2019t go to a march,\u201d she once stated, \u201cbut you can make work that deals with your anger.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u201cThe Weight of Betrayal,\u201d 2015, by Betye Saar.<\/p>\n

(Brian Forrest \/ Roberts Projects)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

In her assemblages, she incorporated symbols that channeled dark episodes of U.S. history and African American struggle: the schematics of slave ships, the hackneyed images of vintage kitsch and the cruel sobriquets used by white supremacists to describe Black children.<\/p>\n

At first she was apprehensive about using this type of imagery in her work. \u201cBlacks were ashamed of those derogatory images,\u201d she told the New York Times. \u201cI like to think I recycled those images from negative to positive.\u201d<\/p>\n

But there was power in those images \u2014 and Saar knew just how to harness it. <\/p>\n

\u201cSaar\u2019s assemblage doesn\u2019t just describe history,\u201d wrote former Times art critic Christopher Knight<\/a> of her work in 2019, \u201cit embodies a visceral connection to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

She would go on to deploy these tropes in myriad ways throughout her career \u2014 in particular the stereotypical figure of the Black mammy. <\/p>\n

This included one particularly potent work: a glass bottle featuring the visage of a smiling mammy, which she transformed into a Molotov cocktail. The piece, which for decades had been in a private collection, reappeared in the traveling exhibition \u201cWe Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85,\u201d<\/a> which went on view at the California African American Museum (CAAM) in 2017.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistorically, the mammy was the ultimate image of Black female servitude in the American psyche,\u201d wrote historian Steven Nelson in the catalog that accompanied a 2017 exhibition of Saar\u2019s work at the Craft Contemporary (then known as the Craft & Folk Art Museum). \u201cShe was kind and giving. She cooked and cleaned and did the laundry. She took care of the children. She was harmless.\u201d<\/p>\n

By arming her mammies with revolvers, rifles and bullets, Saar turned a symbol of servility into one of militancy and power.<\/p>\n

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\u201cLiberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail,\u201d 1973, shown at the exhibition \u201cWe Wanted a Revolution\u201d at CAAM in 2017.<\/p>\n

(Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum \/ Betye Saar, Roberts Projects)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Her work also frequently touched on the personal: family, dreams, magic and the body (particularly the Black female body). In the process, she influenced a younger generation of artists, key figures such as Houston Conwill, Senga Nengudi and David Hammons.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can really see the impact she had on them,\u201d said Kellie Jones, a scholar and independent curator who organized \u201cNow Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980\u201d<\/a> at the Hammer Museum in 2011. \u201cShe had this multimedia practice. It was about Africa, but it was about the world. She has works with Mexican milagros<\/i>, she has titles in Spanish, she at certain points has Asian influence and Haitian influence. She was really looking at the globe. She was a person in the world, and she really modeled that for people like Hammons and Conwill and Nengudi.\u201d<\/p>\n

Saar\u2019s work resides in the permanent collections of more than 80 international museums, and in recent years, she was the subject of solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Prada Foundation in Milan and the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona (which hosted a retrospective).<\/p>\n

In L.A., she had regular exhibitions at her Culver City gallery Roberts Projects<\/a>, as well as one-woman shows at CAAM and the Craft Contemporary. In 2019, a small but potent show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art<\/a> explored the ways in which her drawing process factored into her assemblage work. But a full retrospective at one of her hometown\u2019s major museums eluded her. <\/p>\n

Saar told The Times that she didn\u2019t let it bother her: \u201cI\u2019ve always done what I did and never felt I was competing with what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n

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An installation view of \u201cMojotech,\u201d 1987, by Betye Saar at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art.<\/p>\n

(Tim Lanterman \/ Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and Roberts Projects)<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

If anything, she competed only with herself. <\/p>\n

Well into her 90s, she continued to get up every day to craft assemblages out of the objects she had amassed in her studio. At 96, she scoured the Huntington Library gardens for a commissioned installation she called a \u201cfull-circle\u201d project. <\/p>\n

\u201cI used to come to the Huntington with my mother when I was a child. She loved to garden, especially African violets, and she passed that love of plants and nature on to me,\u201d Saar told the New York Times Style Magazine<\/a> in 2024. <\/p>\n

That love is palpable in \u201cDrifting Toward Twilight\u201d<\/a> and its accompanying documentary, which sees Saar fawning over the orange tint of sloughed bark and the mystical qualities of garden scraps. <\/p>\n

\u201cEven in death those things can be really beautiful,\u201d Saar said in the short documentary. <\/p>\n

After working with a 17-foot canoe as a centerpiece for the Huntington exhibition, Saar told Curate LA that she felt compelled to return to small-scale pieces. The result was her 2024 Roberts Projects exhibit, \u201cBetye Saar: New Work,\u201d<\/a> an objet trouv\u00e9 medley in bronze and gold hues. <\/p>\n

\u201cAt first, the new works were more nostalgic, with vintage photos and female ephemera, like gloves and such,\u201d Saar said. \u201cThen I brought in the tall ship bookends and African masks, and the works moved in a more ancestral and political direction.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even her grandson\u2019s discarded computer parts made a cameo, a testament to Saar\u2019s uncanny ability to mine inspiration from the most mundane objects. <\/p>\n

\u201cThe worst problem for an artist is having nothing to say,\u201d she once said in an interview. \u201cI just have so many ideas. \u2026 Look at things that are important to you, what\u2019s happening in your life. If you have that, you never run out of ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n

With her centennial on the horizon, Saar in 2025 formed the Betye Saar Legacy Group<\/a>, a committee of her trusted curators and collaborators charged with preserving her vast archive and keeping her name fresh in the minds of new generations of artists. <\/p>\n

A Saar biography penned by Zo\u00e9 Whitley, who co-curated \u201cSoul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,\u201d is expected in 2027. <\/p>\n

Saar is survived by her daughters Lezley, Alison (both artists) and Tracye (a writer), and her grandchildren Kyle Leeser, Maddy Inez, Sola Saar, Gen Saar Agustsson, Spencer Saar Cavanaugh, Megan Cavanaugh<\/p>\n

Times staff writers <\/i>Malia Mendez and Jessica Gelt contributed to this report.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.latimes.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n