Sunday in the Art Room SITAR

 Welcome to 

SITAR is about ANYTHING art. Your art, someone else's art, writing, photography, the art of cooking, the art of sewing and textiles. Sharing historical art, street art, a story about art. Do you have a question or need help with art? Write a blog post and link it up here. We will all try to help with it. My only rule is that if someone asks for critique it must be done with generosity and consideration. 

This is a place of learning, encouragement and inspiration.

 

I'm happy to introduce to you,

Betye Irene Saar.

July 30, 1926 – July 26, 2026 

Betye Saar was an American artist know for her work in the medium of assemblage. She was a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Betye was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the  1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career. Bety is best know for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States. 

Betye Saar was born Betye Irene Brown on July 30, 1926, to Jefferson Maze Brown and Beatrice Lillian Parson in Los Angeles, California. Both parents attended the University of California, Los Angeles, where they met. Betye spent her early years in Los Angeles.  After her father's death in 1931, Betye and her mother, brother, and sister moved in with her paternal grandmother, Irene Hannah Maze, in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles. The family then moved to Pasadena, California, to live with Saar's maternal great-aunt Hatte Parson Keys and her husband Robert E. Keys 

She attended college and during that time met and married  Richard Saar and gave birth to 3 daughters. 

Betye started her adult life as a social worker, and then later pursued her passion for art. She began her graduate education in 1958, originally working towards a career in teaching design. However, a printmaking class she took as an elective changed the direction of her artistic interests. She described printmaking as her "segue from design into fine arts" 

 The  late 1950s-1960s began her artistic career primarily focused on design and printmaking. She created colors etchings, intaglio prints and drawings that incorporated stamps and stencils. Her early themes leaned heavily towards family, cosmology and mysticism. Her early prints were filled with windows, moons, hands, stars, eyes, astrological signs, and shadowy figures. They suggested that visible reality was only one layer of experience.

Betye's collected racist imagery and continued throughout her career. She was inspired to create assemblages by a 1967 exhibition by found object sculptor, Joseph Cornell. She was also greatly influenced by Simon Rodia's Watts Towers, which she witnessed being built in her childhood. Betye said that she was "fascinated by the materials that Simon Rodia used, the broken dishes, sea shells, rusty tools, even corn cobs—all pressed into cement to create spires. To me, they were magical."

Assemblage Art

 

The Grand Dame of Assemblage art. 

 Printmaking had allowed her to build symbolic worlds on paper. Assemblage allowed her to place history itself inside a frame.

She began searching flea markets, swap meets, antique shops and secondhand stores. Her collections of everything from clocks, bottles, beads, fabric, washboards, dolls, photos, boxes, bones and household objects held the spirit of those no longer remembered. She understood that objects absorb meaning from the people and systems around them. Some carried intimacy, others carried violence.  Among the objects found in American markets and kitchens were caricatures of Black poeple produced during slavery's long aftermath. Smiling mammies, grinning servants, exaggerated dolls, advertisements, postcards and household containers had been created to make racial hierarchy look comforting, humorous or harmless. 

 They were not harmless. They reduced Black men and women to obedient figures whose exaggerated smiles concealed the realities of forced labor, segregation, economic exploitation and  humiliation.

 By the late 1960's the Civil Rights Movement had exposed the violence required to maintain racial inequality. Black artists were demanding control over Black representation. The Black Arts Movement encouraged art that did not seek permission for white institutions before speaking directly to Black History, identity, anger and possibility. After the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in April 1968, many artists including Betye became more politically aware. With 3 children she couldn't always march, and publicly demonstrate so she made art into her form of protest. 

In 1972, the Rainbow Sign, a Black   cultural center in Berkeley, invited artists to participate in an exhibition     about Black heroes. Betye could  have chosen any recognizable leader.    Instead, she decided to create a         Black heroine from an image     designed to deny Black women  dignity. She chose Aunt Jemima. 

The reaction to Betye Saar’s 1972 artwork, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, was explosive and deeply transformative. By taking a demeaning, smiling Jim Crow caricature and arming her with a rifle and a grenade, Betye "touched a national nerve" and created a definitive icon for both the Black Power and feminist movements.

Betye Saar continued to create art until the day she passed.  

 

 

Everything I have read about Betye, tells me she was a fearless woman, in a time of fear, and an artist that shows the world a different direction. She was also very eloquent. 

Hope you learned something new today on SITAR

Nicole 

 

I will be joining Gillena
 

Studio Museum in Harlem 

Artsy.net 

Roberts Projects