The labels sewn onto the dress in this tableau list various racial epithets for Black children, and the wooden hanger branded with the work’s title alludes to the marking of enslaved people with branding irons. This evocative installation suggests the fragile innocence that is lost—not only historically but also to this day—as Black children grow into adults facing racism in its many guises.

Saar titled this work Tantric Tray in her related sketchbook drawing on view nearby, evoking the Tantric practice of eye gazing, a tool for opening oneself to a higher plane of consciousness. At the same time, the lozenges in the baking pan at center can be read as a dozen martinis with stuffed olives seen from above—a witty play on Saar’s
use of a cocktail tray for this assemblage.

Since the late 1960s, Saar has used discarded window frames like this one in her art. Here, she pays homage to a figure of legend venerated in Brazil: the blue-eyed, black-skinned Anastacia. Though expunged in the 1980s by the Brazilian Catholic Church, Anastacia was embraced by the local Umbanda religion, which combines aspects of Catholicism, Spiritism, and African and indigenous Brazilian belief systems. Copper coils on nails emerge from the window frame, suggesting psychic power or energy. The copper circuit boards used as a support evoke another form of energy generation and circulation.

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.”

Saar identifies the bird atop the cage in this drawing as “(Jim) Crow.” Jim Crow laws were used to enforce racial segregation in the American South from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 to the beginning of the civil rights movement in the 1950s. The name supposedly derives from a nineteenth-century minstrel routine called “Jump Jim Crow,” which was performed by a white man in blackface; it eventually became a derogatory name for Black Americans.

Sanctuary Awaits is informed by the African Kongo tradition of bottle trees, which are garlanded with bottles, vessels, and other objects to protect a household. Black people in the Caribbean took up this tradition as early as the 1790s; it continues today in the southern United States, where many still believe that bottle trees ward off evil. Saar made this sculpture as one of a three-part piece exhibited in conjunction with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta.

In this early sketchbook, Saar recorded a range of dolls, from those that give comfort to those—like the two “pickaninny” dolls holding watermelon wedges—that cause pain. In the nineteenth century, manufacturers advertised such dolls, which were made of durable materials, as suitable for rough treatment, presumably by the white children for whom they were purchased. In Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court case that outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, social scientists Kenneth and Mamie Clark submitted evidence from tests performed with dolls that demonstrated segregation’s demeaning impact on Black children. The perpetuation of stereotypical images reinforced those negative feelings.

Saar made these drawings while visiting an exhibition of handmade Black dolls. Produced between 1850 and 1940, the dolls were likely created by African Americans for children they knew. Until recently, positive, nonstereotyped Black dolls were rarely produced by commercial manufacturers.

Cream is a “family portrait” featuring a child’s dress surrounded by photographs of Saar’s relatives. The young girl in the photo at bottom is Saar’s mother and the adults flanking the dress sleeves are Saar’s maternal grandparents. The generational story continues with Saar’s own handprint at bottom center and those of her youngest granddaughter, made when she was a year old. The butterflies that float among them suggest that while appearance is mutable, the essence of a creature remains the same.

The sketch for Blend, a collage incorporating a vintage dress, is labeled “Blend (-Slipping-Passing),” suggesting that the pale figure wearing the dress in the final work is a Black woman passing as white. She holds in her gloved hands a framed photo of Saar’s late great-aunt Hattie, who has
been something of a muse for the artist. The elegiac tone of Blend reflects the experience of racial passing as one of loss or exile. The sketch for Cream indicates Saar knew early in the creative process that she would use a particular dress and a variety of buttons in the final collage. The buttons progress from white at the top to black at the bottom, reflecting different shades of skin color. Saar’s grandfather was Native American and Black, while her grandmother was Irish.

Saar began collecting washboards in the mid-1990s, inspired by memories of the one her grandmother used on her back porch. The artist has said she is interested in the “dichotomy between an object that was used to keep something clean and the person [using it], who was a slave and considered a dirty person because of the color of her skin.”

The work’s title references Aunt Jemima and her famous pancake mix, which in the 1910s and ’20s featured the advertising tagline “I’se in town, honey.” The figure of Aunt Jemima, which is based on the stereotype of a mammy, has appeared frequently in Saar’s work—inaugurated in her iconic The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). In response to the recent news that the Aunt Jemima brand and image will finally be retired, Saar has said, “I transformed the derogatory image of Aunt Jemima into a female warrior figure, fighting for Black liberation and women’s rights. Fifty years later she has finally been liberated herself. And yet, more work still needs to be done.”

Saar’s sketches are a repository of sources and ideas for her completed works. Here, she wrote, “A.J. [Aunt Jemima] white invention.” She also attributed the words inscribed on the bottom of the washboard
to Henry Dumas (1934–1968), an African
American writer and activist who was
killed at age thirty-three by a New York
City transit police officer.

In Supreme Quality, Saar shows Aunt Jemima as a gun-toting figure. At the same time, she is surrounded by accoutrements of feminine labor. A clock whose hands have been replaced by an American flag can be found on the back of the work, suggesting the unending nature of the mammy’s tasks. The inscription, “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines,” which appears on a number of Saar’s assemblages, may refer to a controversial essay published in 1997 in The International Review of African American Art. Titled “Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroes,” the text, in which Saar is quoted, addresses the incorporation of racist imagery into works by contemporary Black artists.

Lettered on the corrugated surface of this vintage washboard are lines from the poem “Proem” (1922) by Langston Hughes. The names of two American cities appear above: Chicago, the site of a bloody race riot in 1919; and Memphis, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. A crumb brush affixed to a mammy figurine with a noose around her neck stands before a photo of a lynching. Her outstretched arms are bullets and she is flanked by Black Power fists. For decades, Saar has transformed such derogatory images into potent symbols. She has said, “When Martin Luther King was assassinated, I reacted by creating a woman who’s my warrior: Aunt Jemima.”

Saar borrowed both the Hughes excerpt and the photo from a page in The Black Book, on view at right. She regards this influential volume as a sourcebook.

The Black Book is an anthology of photographs, newspaper clippings, quotations, sheet music, patent applications, advertisements, and other ephemera, which together form a picture of Black life in America. The volume, assembled by Middleton A. Harris under the editorial eye of Toni Morrison—whose uncredited poem appears on the back jacket—is unflinching in its documentation of slavery, racially motivated violence, and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes. Saar was in the midst of her own reclamation of racist imagery when the book was published, having produced The Liberation of Aunt Jemima two years earlier. In A Call to Arms, Saar stenciled the Langston Hughes excerpt seen here onto a vintage washboard, where it joins other imagery to create a narrative of Black liberation.

Look closer

In 1975, the author and activist Ishmael Reed (b. 1938) invited Saar to create a series of collages for his book of poetry A Secretary to the Spirits. In another form of “call and response,” each of Saar’s collages is inspired by and named after one of Reed’s poems. Saar employed a layered approach that echoes Reed’s poetry, which combines references to the ancient and the contemporary, the spiritual and the mundane.

In the title piece of the series, a robed Black man who resembles a saint from a medieval gospel book holds a slice of watermelon in his hand. Beneath him we find the repeating image of a character—based on an offensive caricature—who has appeared in some form on packaging for Cream of Wheat since the 1890s. “Slavery is illegal, yet African Americans are still shackled by derogatory images,” Saar has written. Colorful borders of red patterned fabric catch the light like gold leaf in an illuminated manuscript. In all of the collages, Saar, who trained as a designer, made deft use of found patterns, such as decorative endpapers and perforated borders in The Return of Julian the Apostate to Rome, and musical staves in Tea Dancer Turns Thirty-Nine and Memo to Stevie Wonder. She also created repetition with found and custom-made rubber stamps in the shapes of stars, palm trees, and a Black saxophone player taken from the design of the cigarette paper brand Blanco y Negro.

All collages are from the collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, gift of the Modern and Contemporary Collectors Committee, 2017

This tableau directly addresses issues of race and women’s work. The image on the ironing board—itself a traditional symbol of female labor—is borrowed from a well-known eighteenth-century print showing scores of Africans packed into a slave ship to cross the Atlantic. Saar’s construction also refers to the marking of enslaved people with branding irons, and to their enchainment in transit or as punishment. The “KKK” appliquéd to the sheet denotes the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, still active today in the United States. According to Saar, this work communicates “the political message that you can treat me as a slave and I’ll bend down—I’ll bend down to pick cotton, I’ll bend to do this, to be a laborer—but I will not break.”

Made shortly before Saar’s seventy-eighth birthday, this assemblage includes years and astrological glyphs on the inner left side that correlate to important dates in her life. The work’s title wittily refers to the timepieces in the sculpture—which, of course, are not ticking; indeed, they are either frozen in time or missing their hands. It also alludes to the artist herself, who is still making art well into her nineties.

Look closer

Throughout her life, Saar has made drawings and collages in response to the places she visits. Unlike the other sketchbooks on display, these works were created without a specific assemblage, collage, or sculptural tableau in mind. Instead, they resemble private souvenirs, combining material and visual traces of her travels with elements

of her established artistic vocabulary. For example, Saar’s 1975 Mexico sketchbook includes images of eyes, hearts, hands, and celestial bodies—leitmotifs that appear throughout her work. Among the mementos pasted into her 1994 sketchbook from Brazil is an image of a lion; as a Leo, Saar frequently includes lions in her art.

All travel sketchbooks are from the collection of Betye Saar, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles

In The Weight of Buddha, Saar retains her focus on race while
simultaneously returning to her early interest in spirituality. The
assemblage is an amalgam of Buddha, Aunt Jemima, Black Sambo—
a children’s book character drawn as a racist “pickaninny” caricature—
and a postal scale, which for Saar symbolizes justice. The
meditative, esoteric figure of Buddha, who is literally being weighed
on the scale, contrasts with the commonsense values ascribed to
Aunt Jemima (Mother Wit) and Black Sambo (Street Smarts).

In 2006, Saar began collecting cages like this one, which she purchased at a swap meet in Long Beach, California. She has said, “The cage, an object of containment, for me became a metaphor for many concepts: ideas of limitations, of emotions, of racism, of feminism, of death, of beauty, of mystery, of legends and superstition.”

Aunt Jemima’s fixed stare and rigid grin in this work refer to the song “Blow Top Blues” by jazz musician Leonard Feather (1914–1994). Popularized in the 1940s, it tells the story of a woman who is going mad. Saar’s subtitle, The Fire Next Time, is taken from James Baldwin’s 1963 book of that title, which addresses the role of race in American history and the connections between race and religion. Baldwin in turn took his title from the antebellum Negro spiritual “Mary Don’t You Weep.”

The title of this tableau references “Empty Bed Blues,” a song recorded by Bessie Smith in 1928. The cot can be seen as a spirit bottle bed, akin to the traditional bottle tree used by the Kongo civilization in west-central Africa to ward off evil spirits. Saar used the cot, which she bought at a secondhand store on Western Avenue in Los Angeles, in at least two earlier installations (in 1990 and 1994); she loves not only using recycled objects but also recycling them herself. In a February 2001 sketch—the first of four she made for this work—Saar introduced the idea that the cot would sit on a bed of coal, a material that evokes energy and change.