POS - Artist Focus (Lesson)

Artist Focus: Betye Irene Saar

This unit is all about shadows. Shadows are so important to creating an impactful drawing, but often their complexities are overlooked. Since shadows can be unexpected in their impact, our artist focus is on an artist who utilizes shadows as a part of her sculptural assemblages. This artist uses the shadow as a component of her artwork just as you will do in this unit. 

BSaar2.jpg

Photo of Betye Saar preparing for an exhibition.

Storyteller and Activist

Betye Irene Saar is an African-American artist known for her work in the medium of assemblage. Saar is a visual storyteller and an accomplished printmaker. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity.

Image from http://www.betyesaar.net

Saar, Betye. Sanctuary Awaits, 1996.

Finding Her Place as an African-American Female Artist

As an African-American woman, she was ahead of her time when she became part of a largely man's club of new assemblage artists in the 1960s. Since then, her work, mostly consisting of sculpturally-combined collages of found items, has come to represent a bridge spanning the past, present, and future; an arc that paves a glimpse of what it has meant for the artist to be black, female, spiritual, and part of a world ever-evolving through its technologies to find itself heavily informed by global influences.

Image from https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saar-betye/

Saar, Betye. I'll Bend but I will not Break (Detail). 1998.

Telling Her Story

Over time, Saar's work has come to represent, via a symbolically rich visual language, a decades' long expedition through the environmental, cultural, political, racial, and economic concerns of her lifetime.

Image from https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saar-betye/

Saar, Betye. Edge of Ethics. 2010.

Adding Spiritualism to Art

Saar, who grew up being attuned to the spiritual and the mystical, and who came of age at the peak of the Civil Rights movement, has long been a rebel, choosing to work in assemblage, a medium typically considered “male,” and using her works to confront the racist stereotypes and messages that continue to pervade the American visual realm.

Image from https://www.theartstory.org/artist/saar-betye

Saar, Betye. Serving Time. 2010.

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