Novelist, anthropologist, and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston (1901–1960) is the subject unifying Betye Saar’s exhibition Sanctified Visions and Ellen Sebastian’s theatrical production Sanctified. Room-sized installations by visual artist Saar (b. 1926), commissioned for MOCA, are on view along with the stage set for the performance piece written and directed by Sebastian (b. 1955). The performance has its world premiere in these galleries, using this stage set, for ten performances in May. Complementing the exhibition and performances is a reading room, with related books on Hurston and the two artists.
Born in the all-Black township of Eatonville, Florida, Hurston attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Barnard College in New York, and was a Guggenheim Fellow and a writer and book reviewer for various magazines and newspapers. She was an early member of the New York literary movement of the Harlem Renaissance, where she met and worked with Langston Hughes, among others. A student of the noted anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston was a pioneering ethnographer in the field of Southern black folklore. Traveling throughout the U.S. and the Caribbean, Hurston spent her life preserving the customs, music, speech patterns, humor, and unique spiritual character of African-American cultures. Her work includes novels, short stories, anthropological essays, and an autobiography.
Betye Saar’s Sanctified Visions is an homage to Hurston. Tracing Hurston’s life from rural Florida to New York, Jamaica, Haiti, and back to Florida, the exhibition is organized by groupings of work symbolically related to those places and time periods.
The first gallery of Saar’s exhibition functions as an introduction to Hurston and focuses on her interests in spirituality and religion and her connections to Haiti. Painted on the floor is a vèvè, a design traditionally made of sprinkled sand by a priest or priestess in vodou to ritual to call or welcome the loas (gods) to a particular locale, in this case, the exhibition. Presented is the vèvè of Erzulie, the goddess of the sea, which represents the beautiful and feminine.
Arranged on the wall are eight bead and sequin pieces, designed by Saar and fabricated by artists in Haiti. The images — such as a heart, dice, serpent, moon, and star — are Saar’s personal icons. Serving to combine ritual idea and technology, on the adjoining wall is an electronic sign programmed with phrases from Hurston’s writings and from Sebastian’s script for Sanctified. Physically and symbolically uniting the exhibition and the set for the performance, and evoking the shanties frequently seen in the rural South and Haiti, is a curved corrugated wall.
The works in the following room form three thematic areas that represent the cycle of Hurston’s life from childhood to adulthood to later life. Symbolizing Hurston’s spiritual being, they are comprised of ordinary objects that have been elaborated or ornamented. The small wooden rocking chair with carved animals and toys, Babe in the Woods (1990), for example, hints at Hurston’s childhood in Florida.
Many of the works incorporate moss, sand, stones, and branches, exemplary of Saar’s practice of using organic materials to depict nature and the passage of time. Paralleling each period of Hurston’s life are three windows (representing spring, winter, and fall) which hold many of these elements, along with other commonplace, man-made objects — rusted belt buckles, hairpins, bits of fabric. Timetable (1990), which covers the period from Hurston’s childhood to her return to Florida, unites sand, table, and clocks and refers to the relentless ticking away of years. Rocks in My Bed (1990) consists of a metal bed laden down with stones, reflecting the loneliness and hard knocks of old age and commenting on the public’s neglect of Hurston’s work in later years (after a prolific career, she died penniless).
Bridging Saar’s installations and introducing the performance space for Sanctified is a neon, flashing sign visually drawing viewers into the staged area.