I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break

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.”