In 1926, Betty Irene Brown was born in Los Angeles to Beatrice L. Parson and Jefferson M. Brown, who met as students at UCLA. After Saar’s father passed away when she was 8 years old, she and her family moved from Watts to Pasadena. Saar briefly studied at Pasadena City College before enrolling at UCLA, where she graduated in 1949 with a degree in Applied Arts.
In the early 1950s, Saar began meeting other artists living in Pasadena, including William Pajaud, Charles White and Curtis Tann, with whom she co-founded the design studio Brown and Tann.
Soon after marrying the ceramicist Richard W. Saar in 1952, Saar moved from Pasadena to South Bay in Los Angeles, where she continued to design and sell jewelry and greeting cards while raising her young daughters, Lezley and Alison. Saar returned to school in 1956 to earn a teaching certificate and enrolled at California State University-Long Beach, where she learned printmaking methods such as lithography, intaglio and etching.
1926 - 1960
In 1926, Betty Irene Brown was born in Los Angeles to Beatrice L. Parson and Jefferson M. Brown, who met as students at University of California, Los Angeles. After Saar’s father passed away when she was 8 years old, she and her family moved from Watts to Pasadena. Saar briefly studied at Pasadena City College before enrolling at University of California, Los Angeles, where she graduated in 1949 with a degree in Applied Arts. At this time, Betty changed the spelling of her name to Betye.
In the early 1950s, Saar began meeting other artists living in Pasadena, including William Pajaud, Charles White and Curtis Tann, with whom she co-founded the design studio Brown and Tann.
Soon after marrying the ceramicist Richard W. Saar in 1952, Saar moved from Pasadena to South Bay in Los Angeles, where she continued to design and sell jewelry and greeting cards while raising her young daughters, Lezley and Alison. Saar returned to school in 1956 to earn a teaching certificate and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where she learned printmaking methods such as lithography, intaglio and etching.
1961 - 1965
Palos Verdes Invitational
Palos Verdes Library Gallery, Palos Verdes, CA, June 4, 1961
Hollywood-Los Feliz Print Exhibit, First Prize
Hollywood-Los Feliz Jewish Center, Los Angeles, CA, March 1965
Saar’s first professional exhibition was a group show held at Palos Verdes Central Library, where she showed the early prints Ring Around the Rosy (1960) and Lo The Pensive Peninsula (1961). That same year, her youngest daughter, Tracye, was born. She would continue to exhibit in group shows throughout Los Angeles and become part of its growing arts community, which included Alonzo and Dale Davis of Brockman Gallery, Suzanne Jackson of Gallery 32 and Beverly Gleaves of Kozlow Gallery.
1967 - 1968
In Honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, October 31 - November 3, 1968
This exhibition was held following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Over 60 of the leading American artists donated works to be sold for the benefit of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Saar’s work was significantly influenced by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the broader Civil Rights Movement. She channeled her grief and anger into her art, particularly her assemblages, using found objects and derogatory imagery of African Americans to critique racism and empower Black identity.
1968
Costume Design
Inner City Cultural Center, Los Angeles, CA, 1968-71
Between 1968 and 1971, Saar designed costumes for productions at the Inner City Cultural Center—the nation’s first major multicultural arts institution founded in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion. Her costume designs appeared in El Manco by Josef Rodriguez (directed by Dave Wille) and The Fantasticks by Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt (directed by Lonny Chapman) during the 1968–1969 season; West Side Story by Arthur Laurents, Leonard Bernstein, and Stephen Sondheim (directed by Lonny Chapman); Room Service by John Murray and Allen Boretz (directed by Nagle Jackson); Burlesque Is Alive and The Alligators Are Coming by Jay Stephens (directed by Stephens); The Gnadiges Fraulein by Tennessee Williams (directed by Stephens); and The Bald Soprano by Eugene Ionesco (directed by Abel Franco) during the 1969–1970 season. For the 1970–1971 season, she designed for Street Scene by Elmer Rice, Kurt Weill, and Langston Hughes (directed by C. Bernard Jackson).
Black Girl's Window, 1969
In Black Girl's Window (1969), a significant marker of this moment, Saar uses the window as a formal device to explore the effects of race both personally and conceptually. Cosmological elements (stars, the sun, a crescent moon) and pictorial emblems (a skeleton and a roaring lion, among others) in Black Girl's Window also reflect Saar's turn toward mystical iconography, which she describes as a pursuit of “occult atmosphere” in her work.
A clairvoyant child, Saar developed a penchant for the unknown and occult. The first three panels of Black Girl’s Window depict the sky and phases of the moon from dawn to twilight. The crescent moons and six-pointed stars that reappear in Black Girl’s Window can also be seen in Saar’s prints. Lo, The Mystique City presents a slightly different version of the planets that appear in Black Girl’s Window above Saar’s self portrait on the bottom pane. This design was inspired by a graphic she saw in a newspaper astrology column.
A proud Leo, Saar often uses lions in her prints. The animals stand among constellations and symbols of the zodiac in the artist’s prints and some of her early window work. In Black Girl’s Window, the lion eats the sun, which is also a symbol of her astrological sign.
The figure at the bottom of Black Girl’s Window is the artist, the griot, the sky gazer, her gaze unflinching. The outline of Saar’s mystic self pressed against the glass makes the panes read as tarot cards. The different symbols and signs of astrology inscribe what her life will be and what her life has already been. The figure’s open palms are sacrificial and Christ-like, but also, when considering contemporary iconography, now suggest the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture of the Black Lives Matter movement. This linkage points to the way that Saar’s work, so occupied by death—particularly Black and racialized death—and fortune-telling, seems to offer a prophecy of the future. The hand is also one of the enduring universal symbols of the artist/maker, providing one more symbol of renewal: the continual presence of creation in Saar’s life.
Film still from Colored Spade, 1971
Colored Spade and Eyeball, 1971
While teaching at Pasadena Film School in 1971, Saar created two experimental films, Colored Spade and Eyeball (1971), which interrogated race and identity through moving pictures, essentially activating her collage practice. The significance of these was later affirmed when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences completed their restoration in 2025. Her involvement in filmmaking deepened as she worked in the art department for Gordon Parks Jr.’s landmark film Super Fly (1972) and served as production designer for Blood’s Way, which premiered at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in November 1972.
"The civil rights movement began for me, personally, with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. I felt such rage. For many years, I had been collecting derogatory images of black people and I decided to use those images, to recycle them and transform them into an army against racism. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) was my first warrior. She was a symbol for both black civil rights and for women’s rights." – Betye Saar
The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972
Following an open call to black artists to show at the Rainbow Sign, a community center in Berkeley not far from the Black Panther headquarters, Betye Saar took it as an opportunity to submit a small box containing an “Aunt Jemima” mammy figure wielding a gun. Since the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Saar’s work had been more political. But her submission to the Rainbow Sign’s exhibition was the first time she intentionally made a political statement through her art. The theme of the exhibition was important figures in Black history. Instead of focusing on a well-known hero, Saar highlighted the heroic resistance of everyday Black women. The work was called The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. Saar’s work caused a sensation. The depiction of Aunt Jemima as a liberator and revolutionary resonated with the growing Black Power and feminist movements.
Years later, civil rights activist Angela Davis said that The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972) was the starting point of the Black Women’s movement.
1973
Betye Saar: Selected Works 1964-1973
California State University, Los Angeles, CA, October 1-25, 1973
Following her show Black Girl’s Window, Saar had a solo exhibition at California State University, Los Angeles of important works created in the last 10 years, such as the Liberation of Aunt Jemima, leather mojos and other pieces previously on view at Berkeley Arts Center. The exhibition was accompanied by a publication with texts from Saar’s friends and colleagues, Gallery Director Josine Ianco-Starrels and art historian Dr. Samella Lewis.
1975
Betye Saar
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, March 20 - April 20, 1975
In 1975 Saar's West Coast success took to the national stage with a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, in which she showed intimate collages and assemblages alongside some large-scale altar installations.
1977
Betye Saar: Ritual, Recent Assemblages and Collages
Jan Baum - Iris Silverman Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, October 11 - November 12, 1977
Saar’s first exhibition with Los Angeles gallerists Jan Baum and Iris Silverman focused on the artist’s intuition and its role in creating her accumulative works, particularly those reflecting her interest in ritual practices of the Black and African diaspora. Funded in part by a grant Saar received from the National Endowment of the Arts, this exhibition included important altar works such as Indigo Mercy (1975), Damballa (1975), Sadhana (1976), Spiritcatcher (1977), Jewel of Ogun (1977), Via Allegory (1977) and Mti (1973). It also marked the first instance where Saar activated her work by inviting visitors to leave offerings at the base of an altar, transforming Mti into a participatory installation, Mti Receives.
1977
FESTAC'77
Lagos, Nigeria, February, 1977
FESTAC'77, also known as the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture was a major international festival held in Lagos, Nigeria in early 1977. In terms of scale, scope, ambition and pure flamboyance, FESTAC'77 had no precedent. The month-long event celebrated African culture and showcased to the world African music, fine art, literature, drama, dance and religion. 16,000 participants, representing 56 African nations and countries of the African Diaspora, performed; the American delegation included Betye Saar, Samella Lewis, Faith Ringgold, Barkley Hendricks, and Noah Purifoy.
Saar’s participation was part of a new, vigorous interest in the political potentialities that crystallized in the U.S. during the Black Arts Movement. The festival provided a forum for diverse contributions, representing a broadening of focus within Afrodiasporic studies itself. Significant stakes were attached to the nature and quality of its divestment from European-derived aesthetics and thematics. Betye Saar captured the optimism of FESTAC'77 in her sketchbook, creating numerous colorful drawings incorporating text with field notes and illustrations. Saar’s assemblages absorbed social and political influences, specifically highlighting African women’s political mobilization, collective action, and historical traditions of resistance.
Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon studio, 1978. Photo by Richard Saar
1978
Spirit Catcher: The Art of Betye Saar
The Originals: Women in Art Film Series, Public Broadcasting Service, February, 1978
Produced by WNET (New York Public Media) in 1977 and directed by Suzanne Bauman, Spirit Catcher: The Art of Betye Saar profiles the life and work of Saar, her fascination with the mystical and the unknown, merging with her social concerns as an African American woman. In the film, John Outterbridge, who as a young artist directed the Watts Art Center in the Watts area of Los Angeles where Saar spent summers as a child, comments "She could be a daughter to one of the pharaohs." It is something approaching wizardry that the artist puts together her stirring icons, using such materials as bones, beads, shells, teeth, fur, feathers and elephant hairs, as well as zodiac signs, old photographs, letters, and family memorabilia.
1980
Rituals: The Art of Betye Saar
The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, April 13 - June 29, 1980
Saar’s solo show at the Studio Museum in Harlem included more than 50 freestanding assemblages, mixed-media collages and other works created through a series of gestures that meaningfully build on each other and reflect the ritualistic nature of her artistic process. This exhibition also debuted Saar’s first site-specific installation, Secrets and Revelations, which featured a small altar surrounded by framed collages and devotional or found objects, such as wooden spindles, antique bottles, circuit boards and palm fronds. Saar also lit candles and incense, transforming the installation into a multisensory experience.
1983
L.A. Energy
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1983
L.A. Energy Mural
One Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, CA, 1983-87
In July 1983, Betye Saar was commissioned to create a large-scale public art initiative for the City of Los Angeles. Titled L.A. Energy, the joyful mural incorporated several key motifs of Saar’s practice, including collaged elements and the interplay of varying hues to highlight a decidedly West Coast color palette. Located downtown on 5th Street between Grand Avenue and Flower Street, its location was highly visible due to immediate proximity to the former headquarters of the Southern California Edison Co.—known as One Bunker Hill—which reigned as the dominant structure at the base of Bunker Hill for decades. L.A. Energy was destroyed in 1987 to make way for new construction.
1984
Betye Saar: Selected Assemblages
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, July 21 - October 7, 1984
Betye Saar: Oasis
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, October 20, 1984 - January 6, 1985
In 1984, Saar presented a two-part solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art—then known as the "Temporary Contemporary"—in Los Angeles, one featuring a selection of assemblage works and the other a site-specific installation titled Oasis. With this new installation, Saar arranged a child’s rocking chair and large glass orbs in piles of sand that covered the floor to represent the idea that “each part of a person's life is an oasis: childhood, old age, death and the path in between.”
Installation view, Betye Saar: Oasis, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA, October 20, 1984 - January 6, 1985
1985
Skowhegan Resident Faculty Artist
Madison, ME, Summer, 1985
In 1985, Saar was invited to attend Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine as a Faculty Artist in Residence. She spent the summer conducting studio visits with emerging artists, giving a talk about her work and creating a new site-specific installation out of materials collected from the grounds, titled Wood + Shadows.
1987
Betye Saar: Mojotech and Artist in Residence
List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, May 16 - June 28, 1987
In Mojotech, Saar interrogates the presence of the metaphysical within the realm of modern technology by juxtaposing ritualistic objects, charms, and symbols with circuit boards and electronic components. This deliberate fusion draws aesthetic and conceptual parallels between the organic world and the constructed technological sphere. Invoking a participatory element, the work invites viewers to leave personal or technological offerings at the base of the altar, echoing the accumulative tradition of African sculpture, which integrates various “power” elements from diverse cultural practices.
Betye Saar creating Mojotech at MIT, 1987
Photo Donna Coveney
"A mojo is an amulet or charm used in some voodoo-based beliefs (religions). Its power is somewhat ambiguious, as it depends on both the user's strength of belief and his or her motive. As a shaman gleans the environment for special ingredients and objects to fabricate the mojo, I glean estate sales, flea markets, and thrift shops at home and in my travels for special materials for my work. My intuition works like radar in accumulating materials. The found objects and discards are then altered, manipulated and transformed in assemblages, collages and installations." –– Betye Saar
1988
United States Information Agency (USIA)
Betye Saar: Connections – Shadow Song, National Art Gallery, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, October 1988
Betye Saar: House of Fortune, Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center of the U.S. Embassy, Manila, Philippines, November 1988
Betye Saar: Voyages, Dreams and Destinations, Taiwan Museum of Art, Taichung, Taiwan, October 8 - December 15, 1988
Working with Evangeline J. Montgomery at the United States Information Agency (USIA), Saar developed a series of exhibitions to be seen throughout Southeast Asia and Oceania. Several exhibitions featured configurations of a work titled House of Fortune: a folding card table and chairs on which Saar carved a variety of runes and alchemical symbols using pyrogravure. On the surface of the card table, Saar painted four sets of handprints touching each other as if to summon spirits from another realm.
At the National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Saar created an installation of hanging silk banners painted to depict her silhouette in different environments. In explaining the title of the installation, Saar has said, “The space there was sort of an open house; it had walls on three sides, and then the other part was a metal grid, so the breeze came in. I hung these banners [and] also had wind chimes so as the banners moved, they hit the wind chimes. That's why it was called Shadow Song.”
Installation views, Betye Saar: Spirit Chairs (A Work in Three Parts), Olympic Arts Festival, Atlanta, GA, Summer, 1996
1996
Betye Saar: Spirit Chairs (A Work in Three Parts)
Olympic Arts Festival, Atlanta, GA, Summer, 1996
Spirit Chairs was commissioned by The Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games Cultural Olympiad as a presentation of the 1996 Olympic Arts Festival in Atlanta, where the sculptures were installed outdoors.
"Much of my art is concerned with the recycling of ordinary objects and the transformation of them into objects with a ritual-like presence. In some areas in Africa, it is custom to place chairs in the "bush" to provide the "spirits" a place to rest–a "seat of the spirit." These three chairs (spirit chairs) were designed for three different temporary sites in Atlanta, Georgia. This installation is dedicated to the "spirit" of the diaspora and to all who have migrated from other places to make a home." -- Betye Saar
2011
Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980
Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA, October 2, 2011 – January 8, 2012
MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY, October 21, 2012 – March 11, 2013
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA, July 20 – December 1, 2013
Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980 chronicled the vital legacy of the city's African American artists. The work of these practitioners was animated to an extent by the civil rights and Black Power movements, reflecting the changing sense of what constituted African American identity and American culture. The power of the black community strengthened nationwide as racial discrimination began to lessen as a result of new legislation and changing social norms. As there were plentiful opportunities for African Americans to make a livelihood in Southern California, Los Angeles soon had a substantial black population, and social, political, and economic changes drew transplants from around the country. Galvanized by these transformations, black artists worked to form a cultural community that became an important part of the city's thriving arts scene.
2011
Red Time
Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA, September 10 – December 17, 2011
Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, New York, NY, March 15 – May 3, 2014
Red Time, Saar’s first solo exhibition with Roberts & Tilton, was a site-specific installation made from “an amalgamation of found, created, borrowed and recycled objects” that examined the artist’s past, present and future. The exhibition divided Saar’s practice into three categories: “In the Beginning,” which featured works from 1960-1970 that reflected Saar’s interest in metaphysics, magic and the occult; “Migration and Transformation,” focusing on works with strong social and political content made between 1970-2010; and “Beyond Memory,” which displayed a selection of recent work from the past two years. In 2014, Red Time was exhibited at Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York.
2017 – 2020
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983
Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom, July 12 - October 22, 2017
Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR, February 3 - April 23, 2018
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, September 14, 2018 - February 3, 2019
The Broad, Los Angeles, CA, March 23 - September 1, 2019
de Young Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, CA, November 9, 2019 – March 15, 2020
Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power is the title of a touring art exhibition originating at the Tate Modern in London in 2017. The exhibition, primarily focused on the period between 1963 and 1983, examined a range of art made by African Americans during and in response to a number of major historical milestones in the United States for black people, including the waning of the civil rights movement after the signing of major new civil rights legislation in the 1960s, the rise and eventual decline of the black power movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and the beginning of the Reagan era in the early 1980s. Organized by the Tate in coordination with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the exhibition traveled to several American museums after premiering in London. The exhibition was curated by Mark Godfrey and Zoé Whitley. A wide variety of critics positively reviewed the exhibition both upon its premiere in the U.K. and during its tour across the United States, although several writers and art historians critiqued aspects of the curation.
2019 - 2022
Betye Saar: Call and Response
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA, September 22, 2019 - April 5, 2020
The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY, September 12, 2020 - January 31, 2021
Mississippi Museum of Art, Jackson, MS, April 10 - July 11, 2021
Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, TX, September 25, 2021 - January 2, 2022
Betye Saar: Call and Response looks at the relationship between preliminary sketches in small sketchbooks, which Saar has made throughout her career, and finished works. In addition, the show includes approximately a dozen small travel sketchbooks with more finished drawings—relating to leitmotifs seen throughout Saar’s oeuvre—that she has made over a lifetime of journeys worldwide. The exhibition covers the span of Saar’s career, including work from her early years up through a new sculptural installation. A fully illustrated publication accompanies the exhibition, taking physical form in response to Saar’s sketchbooks. This is the first exhibition at a California museum to address her entire career and the first anywhere to focus on her sketchbooks.
Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020
After nearly a decade of focused work in printmaking, artist Betye Saar created her autobiographical assemblage Black Girl’s Window in 1969. This exhibition explores the relation between her experimental print practice and the new artistic language debuted in that famous work, tracing themes of family, history, and mysticism, which have been at the core of Saar’s work from its earliest days. Celebrating the recent acquisition of 42 rare, early works on paper, this is the first dedicated examination of Saar’s work as printmaker.
2021 – 2023
Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight
Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL, October 28, 2021 – April 17, 2022
49 Nord 6 Est FRAC Lorraine, Metz, France, September 9, 2022 - January 22, 2023
Kunstmuseum Luzern, Lucerne, Switzerland, February 25 - June 18, 2023
Serious Moonlight is a survey of rarely exhibited immersive, site-specific installations from 1980 to 1998. Rooted in the artist’s critical focus on Black identity and intersectional feminism as well as the racialized and gendered connotations of found objects, Saar’s installations expand on her celebrated repertoire and offer broadened insight into ritual, spirituality, and cosmologies in relation to the African American experience and the African diaspora. Saar’s intimately scaled works of the 1960s and 1970s–poignant examinations of race and gender through assemblages of readymades and found objects–became icons of Black feminist art. In works like The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), Saar altered and augmented found, commercially available objects—in this case adding a rifle and a raised fist to the familiar stereotypical commercial emblem—in order to highlight and dismantle racialized images that pervade everyday life.
Betye Saar: The Alpha and the Omega
Atlas, Torre, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy
Long term installation
Initially conceived during her solo exhibition Uneasy Dancer, Saar created this installation of works for a circular room at the Fondazione Prada, alluding to the cyclical and enigmatic nature of life through an amalgamation of found objects, materials and symbols from her rich visual lexicon.
Installation view, Betye Saar: The Alpha and the Omega, Atlas, Torre, Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy
2023
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, MA, February 16 – May 21, 2023
Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer explores Saar’s trips to Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas, highlighting works influenced by her many trips and her engagement with global histories of travel. Through these profound works, the artist reflects on themes of race, colonialism, forced migration, and spiritual systems that blend religious traditions from around the world. Showcasing the sketchbooks she used to capture ideas during her trips and later for her finished works, the exhibition celebrates Saar’s creative process and her ability to conjure the transporting experience of a voyage to a faraway place.
2024-25
Equal Justice Initiative
In 2024, the Equal Justice Initiative commissioned Betye Saar to create a new work for the expanded Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.
“In many of my works, I’ve used canoes and boats as I’m drawn to their symbolism of movement and journeys. This particular canoe has wear and tear, holes and scrapes, of the journey it has endured. The interior is stenciled with the haunting diagram of the 1781 slave ship Brooks, a stark reminder of how people were packed, shipped, and trafficked across oceans in the most horrific of conditions. The red is about the blood spilled, the sacrifices made.”
“It’s a reminder that these histories are still present in the land we walk on. For me, this work is about movement, both human and animal, and the sacrifices made in the journey. It’s about the mystery of history, seen and unseen, shadowed and then brightened by the light we bring to it.” –– Betye Saar
"It may not be possible to convey to someone else the mysterious transforming gifts by which dreams, memory, and experience become art. But I like to think that I can try." –– Betye Saar