{"id":22669,"date":"2023-03-05T11:57:53","date_gmt":"2023-03-05T16:57:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/?p=22669"},"modified":"2023-03-05T12:18:25","modified_gmt":"2023-03-05T17:18:25","slug":"how-travel-inspired-betye-saars-magical-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/2023\/03\/05\/how-travel-inspired-betye-saars-magical-art\/","title":{"rendered":"How Travel Inspired Betye Saar’s Magical Art"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In 1968, Betye Saar embodied her growing interest in ritual and ancestral traditions in \u201cAfrica,\u201d one of her first assembles. It\u2019s a small wooden box that hinges open to reveal a photo of a Black tribal figure (she was then often using images from National Geographic magazine), buttons, striped Kente fabric, mirrors, a spine bone, brown fur, and a toy circus elephant split in two. The artist seems to be reaching out for connection to a place she\u2019s not yet been.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Africa,” 1968, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSometimes I feel like a medium, the connection between the material and the message. Sometimes, the message is the secrets of Africa, Egypt, Oceania, or the limbo of before birth \/ after death,\u201d Saar wrote in a 1975 artist statement. \u201c\u2026Sometimes the message charts of strange rituals or whispers of faded memories.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The dazzling exhibition \u201cBetye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer\u201d at Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum<\/a> from Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023, explores how world travels have inspired the Los Angeles artist\u2019s work\u2014from the sketchbooks she made while on the road to the iconic, magical assemblages that she put together upon her return home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\u201cBetye
\u201cBetye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer\u201d at Boston\u2019s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum from Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (\u00a9Greg Cook photo)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Saar traveled to Europe and Morocco in 1968, then she began to travel widely in the 1970s, when she was in her 40s and her three daughters were adolescents, old enough to be without her for a while. Art fellowships and awards often funded her passage. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s early travels seem to parallel the Black Arts Movement and Black Power civil rights movement\u2019s searching for the ancestral and spiritual roots of the African diaspora. She visited Haiti in 1974 and \u201978, Mexico in 1975, Nigeria in 1978. \u201cI was really interested in going to Haiti because I had never really been to an all-Black country,\u201d Saar told Gardner exhibition curator Diana Seave Greenwald in 2021. Saar went on to visit Taiwan, Japan, Egypt, Bali, Brazil. \u201cTo date,\u201d the museum says, \u201cshe has visited 32 countries.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Betye
Betye Saar. (courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles: Photo David Sprague_<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Betye Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1926, her father a Black man from Louisiana, her mother a white woman from Iowa. Her family moved to Pasadena in the early 1930s. She watched Italian immigrant Simon Rodia constructing his 100-foot-tall Watts Towers<\/a> near her grandmother\u2019s house, like soaring mosaiced church steeples hand-made from glass, pottery, tile, concrete and steel between 1921 and 1954\u2014an inspiration she would carry with her through her life. She studied design at Pasadena City College and the University of California at Los Angeles, graduating in 1949. She founded a design and jewelry firm, married in 1952 and bore three daughters. She studied printmaking at California State University at Long Beach in 1959. The family moved to Laurel Canyon in 1962, where she still lives and works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar made etchings and screenprints in the early 1960s of galloping horses, women and unicorns, pregnant mothers, tarot cards. Around 1966, her art shifted to assemblage. California then was a hotbed of assemblage art that was by turns visionary and politically-engaged\u2014including by Edward Kienholz, Wallace Berman, George Herms and especially the Black artists John Ouftterbridge, Noah Purifoy, Melvin Edwards and Ed Bereal. Purifoy and Judson Powell organized a 1966 exhibition at the Watts Towers Arts Center of art made from the wood, metal and other rubble from the 1965 Watts Uprising. Saar was also inspired by the retrospective of Joseph Cornell\u2019s dreamy surreal assemblages at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s early assemblages featured occult imagery\u2014astrology, tarot, palmistry, phrenology, suns, moons, stars. She collected materials to use at LA swap meets and flea markets\u2014and later during her travels. She incorporated family photos, jewelry and fabrics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then in groundbreaking and hugely influential artworks, Saar began reclaiming the racist Aunt Jemima pancake mix advertising icon. In \u201cThe Liberation of Aunt Jemima,\u201d<\/a> a small, powerful 1972 shadowbox (not on view here), Saar took a 1930s plastic mammy memo and pencil holder and added a little rifle and Black Power fist, turning the enslaved nanny into a freedom fighter. \u201cMy intent was to transform a negative, demeaning figure into a positive, empowered woman \u2026 a warrior ready to combat servitude and racism,\u201d Saar said in 1998 (as quoted in the catalog for her 2005 retrospective \u201cExtending the Frozen Moment\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Migration: Africa to America II,” 2006, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Migration: Africa to America II,” 2006, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The Gardner exhibition includes Saar\u2019s 2006 assemblage \u201cMigration: Africa to America II.\u201d On one side is a traditional carved African figure. On the reverse is a painted Aunt Jemima holding a vintage photo of an elegant Black woman in a broad-brimmed hat and early 20th century dress. A faded slave ship diagram appears behind them. It feels like a history of African roots, enslavement, liberation, continued oppression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy purpose in creating these works is to remind us about the struggle of African Americans and to reclaim the humiliating images of how these workers were once portrayed,\u201d Saar told Jane Carpenter in 2003. \u201cI feel that, however painful, there is honor in re-presenting the past. Racism should neither be ignored or satirized, as it is a form of bondage for everyone, regardless of color. Racism cannot be conquered until it is confronted.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While in Chicago with the artist David Hammons for the National Conference of Artists in 1970, Saar visited Chicago\u2019s Field Museum of Natural History. \u201cThat\u2019s when my work turned from European mysticism to third-world mysticism,\u201d Saar told Carol Eliel, curator of the 2019 exhibition \u201cBetye Saar: Call and Response\u201d at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2018. \u201cBefore I was using symbols that were more Eurocentric. But when I went to the Field Museum, in the basement they had all this work from Africa, Oceania, and even China and Japan\u2014everything that wasn\u2019t European, which was displayed nicely upstairs. All this other strange stuff was down in the basement . We were the only people there, down in this basement with this weird, fetish, magic stuff.\u201d (Note: \u201cExtending the Frozen Moment\u201d and the 2011 exhibition \u201cNow Dig This: Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980\u201d place this trip at 1970, the Gardner exhibition puts the trip in 1974, and Eliel dates the visit to 1964.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Back home in Los Angeles afterward, Saar collected similar materials to use in her work\u2014\u201cleather, hair, shells, bones.\u201d She wanted her assemblages to embody \u201ca Black or African American consciousness or awareness, and recycling it into art form,\u201d Saar told Eliel in 2018.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s inspirations came to include folk art, visionary art and yard shows, bottle trees and shrines, African-American culture, Haitian Vodou, the Watts Towers, the midcentury California assemblage art movement, Byzantine reliquaries, the Black Arts Movement, the Black Power civil rights movement that arose after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and feminism (she participated in the groundbreaking cooperative Womanspace<\/a> gallery with Judy Chicago and others).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s art sketchbooks are typically working objects, spiral-bound books filled with schematic diagrams jotted in ballpoint pen to plan out the art ideas inspired by the materials she\u2019s found. \u201cWhich comes first, the sketch or the object? It\u2019s the object. The object comes first,\u201d Saar told Eliel in 2018. \u201cI start with the found object and transform it, making it into something different, changing the idea of its use into an emotion or a feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Betye
Betye Saar, Haiti Sketchbook, 1974, Watercolor and collage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, Haiti Sketchbook, 1974, Watercolor and collage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

But on her trips abroad, Saar made travel sketchbooks and scrapbooks, begun on the road and often finished in her LA studio. In these books, collages, drawings and paintings are worked up into stand-alone artworks. During her 1974 trip to Haiti, for example, which is included in the Gardner exhibition, Saar filled the sketchbook she carried with images of crosses, feathers, moon and suns, tourist stamps, the Citadelle Laferri\u00e8re, stamps featuring President M. Jean-Claude Duvalier, playing cards, rainbows. sacred hearts, a scrap of paper reading \u201cHoodoo Creek.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHer finished assemblages,\u201d a Gardner exhibition sign says, \u201cspeak more to her fascination with Haitian Vodou, a religion that combines elements of West and Central African religions and Catholicism. Her trips throughout the Americas deepened her interest in hybrid religions\u2014from Vodou to Sant\u00e9ria\u2014that have their origins in communities of enslaved people who were forcibly transported from West and Central Africa to the Americas.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cWhenever I travel, I like to go to the shrines, or relics of shrines. A lot of things have been taken away, but there\u2019s always some place that carries materials from the alternative religion…like the bot\u00e1nicas, or [other stores] that are connected with alternative spirituality, Vodou and things like that,\u201d the Gardner museum quotes Saar.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s assemblages are powered by alchemical combinations of found beads, perfume jars, masks, clocks, chains, pocket knives, wind-up toys, bells, statues of birds and faces and Buddhas. She often incorporates bird cages that evoke slavery, prison, whats in our minds, caged birds, escape, freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar skillfully uses the the stagecraft of shrines and altars\u2014the central focus, objects that seem freighted with the past and a feeling of the ancestors, mysterious and perhaps symbolic resonances between the objects, the hierarchy of objects from little to big, the use of mirrors and glass and rich colors to make the artworks visually dazzle, the motif of eyes that feel as if they\u2019re watching us. The modest scale of her assemblages often make them feel like the altars found in homes or shops, small, personal, intimate holy spaces flashing with energy amidst the jumble of everyday life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Objects, Obsessions, Obligations,” 2013, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Attending the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture in Lagos, Nigeria, in 1977, inspired Saar to regularly incorporate \u201cthe names of African spirits and images of African masks in her work,\u201d an exhibit sign explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar was inspired by \u201cwidespread Buddhist practice of bringing offerings to local temples and shrines,\u201d the museum says, during her U.S. State Department supported 1988 tour of East and Southeast Asia, including Malaysia. She sent home boxes of materials for her art. Recalling this trip, she told Greenwald in 2021, \u201cI love to get off of a plane at a place and I don\u2019t understand the language you\u2019re speaking. I don\u2019t understand why they dress that way. \u2026 As soon as you get off \u2026 you would just right away be in an entirely different situation.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A 1994 artist residency in a villa in Bellagio, Italy, drew her \u201cto the mystical, evocative pageantry of Catholic ritual,\u201d the museum says.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

During a 2000 trip to Egypt, Saar told Greenwald in 2021, \u201cOne of the things that I found interesting was how important Nubia [present-day Sudan] was to Egypt. And most of the people there [in Egypt] had dark skin and kinky hair. You know, like the Nubians did. And now, in our history, they never even mention Nubia. \u2026 Wow. Racism is something.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Her adventures fueled her art. \u201cSpirituality means different things to different people, but it\u2019s the feeling that I\u2019m after,\u201d Saar said in 1994. \u201cThe feeling that when you look at something that I do…that you feel different, or…curious about something that is unknown in your own self.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2023 or the respective creators.)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Globe Trotter,” 2007, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, \nEternity\u2019s Witness,” 1992, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, \nEternity\u2019s Witness,” 1992, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Africa,” 1968, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Midnight Madonnas,” 1996, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Legends in Blue,” 2020, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Kingdom of the Spirits,” 1991, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Jewel of Ogun,” 1977, Mixed media sculpture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Jewel of Ogun,” 1977, Mixed media sculpture.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Indigo Illusions,” 1991, Mixed media assemblage with neon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Globe Trotter,” 2007, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye
“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (Photo \u00a9Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye
“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (Photo \u00a9Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye
“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (Photo \u00a9Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Objects, Obsessions, Obligations,” 2013, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Objects, Obsessions, Obligations,” 2013, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye
“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (Photo \u00a9Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar passports.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\"Betye
Betye Saar, Malaysia sketchbook, 1988 Watercolor and collage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
\""Betye
“Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer” exhibition at Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Feb. 16 to May 21, 2023. (Photo \u00a9Greg Cook)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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\"Betye
Betye Saar, “Globe Trotter,” 2007, Mixed media assemblage.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 1968, Betye Saar embodied her growing interest in ritual and ancestral traditions in \u201cAfrica,\u201d one of her first assembles. It\u2019s a small wooden box that hinges open to reveal a photo of a Black tribal figure (she was then often using images from National Geographic magazine), buttons, striped Kente fabric, mirrors, a spine bone, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":22665,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[1015,496,215],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22669"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22669"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22669\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22748,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22669\/revisions\/22748"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}