The cultural historian George Lipsitz has commented on this piece: “The descendants of yesterday’s slaves and servants are not free; millions of them are serving time in jails and prisons while others are locked into low-wage jobs and locked out of upward mobility. By associating contemporary incarceration with historical slavery and Jim Crow segregation, Saar renders the cage as evidence of the oppressor’s cruelty rather than as a representation of the deserved fate of the oppressed.”
Betye Saar
Serving Time, 2010
Metal cage with stand, figures, keys, and locks
Collection of Neil Lane. Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, California.© Betye Saar.
Robert Wedemeyer
Rachel Federman: In 1965, the predominantly African-American neighborhood of Watts was the site of an uprising. It was one of many uprisings around the country that reflected frustration with the persistent inequitable treatment of Black and brown communities. In its wake, the artists Noah Purifoy and others created art from the wreckage, displaying their assemblages in an exhibition called 66 Signs of Neon. Saar, who lived in Laurel Canyon with her three daughters at the time, was acutely aware of the Watts Rebellion. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated three years later in Memphis, it marked a turning point in her work. This is Saar speaking in 2011.
Betye Saar: That was another crossroads for me, another place where my work really changed. It just seemed really terrible the way that was, and I began to not abandon the magical things, the occult things, but to really focus on the plight of Black people. And that's when I did, what, '72 that I did the Liberation of Aunt Jemima. And that just started me on investigating by recycling derogatory images of how Black people were traditionally depicted into making them heroes and to making them warriors and so forth.
Audio: Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles