Roberts & Tilton is pleased to present The Alpha & Omega, a site-specific installation by legendary Los Angeles artist Betye Saar (b. 1926, Los Angeles). In this, her second solo exhibition at the gallery, Saar will explore the physical, mental and spiritual aspects of a life journey, using objects that symbolize and memorialize life's milestones. The installation in the project room will include numerous mixed media assemblage works created through Saar’s practice of recycling common objects. Saar reimagines beds, chairs and tables which are stripped of their original context and become charged with new meaning.
Red Time, Betye Saar’s first installation at the gallery in 2011, was a retrospective of work which utilized the color red to suggest the elements of fire and earth. The theme chosen for The Alpha & Omega is a serene, aqua blue to symbolize the elements of water and air. Aqua is not a primary color, but a blend which Saar feels suggests emotions and states of being.
Widely recognized as a seminal Los Angeles artist, Betye Saar received her BA from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949, with graduate studies at California State University at Long Beach, the University of Southern California, and California State University at Northridge. Saar’s work is found in the permanent collections of over 60 museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC. Saar’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica.
Saar was featured in seven Pacific Standard Time exhibitions including Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960-1980, an exhibition that originated at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, traveled to MoMA PS1, New York and is currently on view at Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA through December 2013. Additionally, her work will be included in the upcoming exhibition Tapping the Third Realm, curated by Meg Linton at the Ben Maltz Gallery at Otis College of Art and Design and Carolyn Peter at Laband Art Gallery at Loyola Marymount University, September 22 - December 8, 2013. Betye Saar will receive a Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA) Distinguished Women in the Arts Award in November 2013