Travel Sketchbooks

Audio:

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

Transcription:

Rachel Federman: As you look at Betty Saar's travel sketchbooks, listen to her reciting her 1993 poem, My Secret Heart.

Betye Saar: My secret heart is seduced by twilight. It remembers the colors of dreams. It longs for solitude and the exotic. My secret heart is a wanderer. It sails the sea of imagination. It soars beyond the clouds, seeking the mysterious. It moves through time, dream time, and space, mind space. My secret heart seeks the dusty, musty, forgotten corners. It constantly haunts hunts, collects, gathers objects, images, feelings. It mixes, matches, embellishes, simplifies, camouflages, fabricates to empower the ordinary to invent artifacts. My secret heart, bridges, memory and vision. It pays homage to lost rituals of unknown civilizations. It expands horizons only to condense them into a frame, a box, a room. My secret heart is ageless. It beats within the rainbow babe in the woods, and it dwells in the house of whispers.