Betye Saar, the artist whose assemblage sculptures transformed racist imagery into powerful symbols of Black female empowerment, has died aged 99. Her 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was credited by activist Angela Davis as instrumental in launching the fight for Black female power.
A warrior against servitude
In 1972, Saar was invited to take part in a group exhibition of Black artists at the Rainbow Sign community centre in Berkeley, California. Selecting from her collection of kitschy trinkets, she chose a figurine of Aunt Jemima, the mop-carrying breakfast brand character. She placed it in a glass-fronted box, evoking a religious icon, and added a toy rifle to the other hand.
“My intent was to transform a negative, demeaning figure into a positive, empowered woman … a warrior ready to combat servitude and racism,” Saar said. The impact was immediate and profound. Angela Davis later credited the work as instrumental in launching the fight for Black female power.
More works appropriating racist imagery followed in the same year. The three-panelled Let Me Entertain You features a Black minstrel playing a banjo, with the same figure superimposed over imagery of lynchings in the second panel, and holding a gun like the instrument in the third. For I’ve Got Rhythm, Saar attached a plastic toy skeleton to the needle of a mechanical metronome and stuck a newspaper cutting inside the lid reading: “Lynched after refusing to dance on white’s command.”
Ritual, religion, and the conjure woman
Saar’s work dealt as much with ritual and religion as with politics. She described herself as a “conjure woman”, a traditional African-American folk healer. She built icons from found amulets, glass beads, broken necklaces, and scraps of every kind – “a hoarder who found her calling”, she joked – and created room-sized installations that doubled as shrines.
After seeing African art at the Field Museum in Chicago, she travelled to Nigeria in 1977, followed by trips to Senegal, Brazil, and Haiti. “Wherever I go, I say: ‘What’s the alternative religion?’ because every country has it,” she told the Guardian in 2021.
Her work Gris Gris Guardian (1990-93), whose title refers to a Voodoo shield against evil, features a miniature painted cabinet filled with candles, braided rope, stones, nails, feathers, and corn husks. In Mojotech (1987), she placed charms, amulets, and Voodoo symbols alongside printed circuit boards and electronic components to create a vast altar piece.
“The idea of the work, the accumulation of the materials, the putting them together, the sharing of a work are all part of a ritual. This process of objectification is … purification. Once in the world, the artwork can become part of someone else’s ritual,” Saar explained.
Early life and influences
Saar was born in the Watts area of Los Angeles to Jefferson Brown, an administrator at the local YMCA and later an insurance clerk, and Beatrice (nee Parson), a seamstress. The family moved to Pasadena in 1930, but her father died a year later after being struck with uremic poisoning. According to Saar, the delay in getting him to a hospital that accepted Black patients proved fatal.
After her father’s death, the family went to live with Betye’s great-aunt Hattie, who became a major influence. After Hattie died in 1974, Saar made Record for Hattie, a box containing the older woman’s jewellery, quilting fabric, sewing pins, a baby picture, and a crucifix.
Saar studied art at Pasadena City College from 1945, then transferred to a design course at UCLA, followed by postgraduate study in education and printmaking at California State University, Long Beach, from 1958 to 1962. After leaving City College, she became a partner in a homeware company, through which she met Richard Saar, a ceramicist, whom she married in 1952.
A visit to a Joseph Cornell exhibition at the Pasadena Museum of Art in 1967 exposed her to assemblage sculpture. “I saw his work and realised that it was OK to make art out of anything,” she said. In 1968, she took a job as a costume designer at the Inner City Cultural Center, a performance arts venue established after the Watts uprising. “Theatre sets and lighting influenced my later work … I liked a certain kind of theatrical feeling to my installations.”
Recognition and legacy
Saar credited Black Girl’s Window (1969) as her first important work, a self-portrait of “my mystic self”. The old window frame holds a phrenologist’s map, a lion holding a sun in its mouth, an eagle bearing a shield inscribed “LOVE”, and the largest pane showing her palms covered with mystical symbols.
In 1970, she co-founded the LA art collective Womanspace alongside Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro. Four years later she curated a group show of Black female artists there. She later refused to describe herself as a feminist, saying, “In Black culture, as far as I know, women [always] worked.”
After the Rainbow Sign exhibition, Saar had a solo show at the Berkeley Art Center. Her third solo exhibition followed at California State University, Los Angeles, in 1973, and much of that exhibition was recreated in the 2017 Tate Modern show Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983.
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, Saar exhibited regularly, though mostly in smaller regional US institutions. Critics noted that for a while her work had lost “its punchy political edge but gained resonance in other areas. Aunt Jemima has given way to beautiful black women in old photographs,” a reference to found prints exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, in 1984. By 1998, the motif returned in Workers and Warriors; The Return of Aunt Jemima at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York.
In 2005, Saar had her first major retrospective at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, with a second career survey a decade later at the Museum Het Nieuwe Domein in the Netherlands, her first solo exhibition in Europe. In 2016, Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer was staged at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, and in 2020, her reputation was sealed with concurrent exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. That year, Quaker Foods North America retired the Aunt Jemima branding from its breakfast range. Saar’s first thought was: “Oh, finally.”
Her marriage ended in divorce in 1968. She is survived by three daughters, Alison, Lezley, and Tracye, and six grandchildren. Betye Irene Saar, artist, born 30 July 1926; died 26 July 2026.
