By Tara Anne Dalbow

Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but she plans to start her day the same way as always: in the studio.

In a small, light-filled room near the top of the Laurel Canyon home where she’s lived since 1962, Saar spends the morning filling sketchbooks with watercolors. Symbols that the pioneering assemblage artist has been “remixing” for more than seven decades — stars, moons, eyes, hands — emerge in vibrant washes of magenta, teal and her favored crepuscular blues.

by Rose Garcia and Madison Browning

There is a certain disjointed element about Los Angeles that disturbs those who haven't lived within it. So vastly different from its East Coast peers, Los Angeles doesn't read like a work of art so much as it does a maze of class disparity and smog. But growing up within this maze grants its children a kinder, keener eye. The pieces of the city come together to form a home entirely unique to each inhabitant. A special handful of these inhabitants—like epochal multimedia artist Betye Saar—eek special meaning in each part part, finding a beautiful, whole universe within these disparate pieces. 

By Ben Davis

They include Betye Saar, Jeffrey Gibson, and—just in time for America 250—Jasper Johns.

We are midway through the year, and I have just finished my quarterly “Museum Artist” list. Below is my ranking of which living artists have been getting the most attention in U.S. museum shows in June 2026.

This time out, I looked at about 350 museums, and found about 3,500 artists on view. Of those, just 720 appeared in more than one museum show during the month.

By Ariana Marsh

It’s a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I’m walking side-by-side with Betye Saar, the legendary Angeleno assemblage artist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement. She’s wearing a tonal gray sweater and coordinating pants with flashes of pale blue cheetah print (a perennial favorite of Saar’s) on her shirt and scarf, her silver hair twisted into a soft top knot, her fingers stacked with flea market jewelry collected over decades. We’re joined by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.

By Jasmine Weber

Nearing the occasion of her 100th birthday, an exhibition at the New York Historical celebrates Saar’s promised gift of her collection of dolls to the institution.

Betye Saar has been accumulating ephemera — taxidermied animals, cages, computer parts, and more — throughout her life. Since the 1970s, she has crafted these found objects into assemblage artworks that often subvert racist artifacts and images, beginning with her famed sculpture “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972).

By Sahir Ahmed

Eight creatives reflect on what their mothers taught them, and what they hope to pass on to their own children.

A mother can make a house feel larger, a crisis smaller, and a phone call overdue. She is often the family's unofficial archivist, event planner, negotiator, medic, and emotional weather system all at once. The strange genius of motherhood is that it can feel simultaneously invisible and all-powerful. Somehow, her voice is always the one her children hear first; though, what she gives rarely divulges itself directly, and almost never expires. 

Betye Saar’s Black Dolls honors the renowned artist’s 100th birthday and celebrates a landmark promised gift to The New York Historical of her collection of more than 100 Black dolls. Ranging from rag dolls handmade by Black women for both the Black and white children in their care to mass-produced toys and tourist souvenirs, some of which were borne of racism and perpetuate stereotypes, the collection includes Hoo Doo Woman (1974), the only Black doll designed and created by Saar herself. 

By Julissa James

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. I

By Dominique Fluker 

On May 2nd, the Hammer Museum at UCLA welcomed cultural leaders, artists, collectors, and patrons of the arts at the 21st annual Gala in the Garden. During the evening, trailblazing artist Betye Saar was honored for her profound contributions to society through her work, in front of industry peers, patrons, and her loving and supportive family members. Ultimately, the Gala raised $2 million to support the museum’s dynamic, internationally acclaimed exhibitions and public programs, which are free for all visitors year-round.

By Kate Simons

Gray skies didn’t prevent L.A.’s arts community from getting fancy in support of the Hammer Museum’s annual Gala in the Garden to celebrate gala honorees Betye Saar and television writer and producer Darren Star. At 99, Saar is among L.A.’s most esteemed and accomplished living artists. Her career has spanned more than seven decades, with an early focus on rejecting white feminism and reclaiming the Black female body. Civil rights activist Angela Davis traced the start of the Black women’s movement to the creation of Saar’s 1972 assemblage piece, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.”

By Alexandria Ryahl 

In 1994, while attending an artist residency at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in northern Italy, Betye Saar experimented with using a Polaroid camera as an artist’s tool in tandem with her skills in printmaking, collage and design. Photographing everything from gardens and native flora to the plethora of objects and architectural details in the villas throughout town, Saar began creating what she referred to as “altered Polaroids:” striking photographic compositions on a miniature scale that synthesized core elements of her practice while evolving towards something bigger.

SPACE IS THE PLACE is a Hammer Contemporary Collection exhibition that takes its title from the 1973 studio album and 1974 film by Sun Ra (1914–1993), a Black American experimental jazz composer and musician known for his radical and esoteric views on Black liberation. The selected works in the exhibition consider “space” as a conceptual framework, through the themes of afro-futurism, belonging, placemaking, and the act of taking up space. SPACE IS THE PLACE comprises installations, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and multi-media works by nearly thirty artists.

By Chris Gardner

The Westwood institution has zeroed in on veteran TV creator Darren Star and notable artist Betye Saar as honorees for the 21st annual Gala in the Garden, set to take place on May 2. The event, Hammer’s largest fundraiser, “honors artists and innovators who have made profound contributions to society through their work,” per the museum. It does so in front of local artists, collectors, patrons, celebrities and other art world insiders.

By Lilia Rocio Taboada

One recognition is the understanding of one’s practice and the personal capacity to learn and shift. Wood + Shadows by Betye Saar carefully delineates this light-made line between interior and exterior worlds. Saar, resident faculty during 1985, worked in assemblage since the early 1960s, often combining found images and materials referencing otherworldly entities and personal history into frames. These frames were shaped in some instances as windows, signaling perspective from one space into another.

By Leigh-Ann Jackson

Not only is Betye Saar a living legend, but the prolific L.A. artist continues to add to her impressive oeuvre day by day. As her centennial birthday approaches this July, Saar shows no signs of slowing down. She still routinely creates art and continues to garner headlines and accolades. Last year, she was honored with the distinction of “Icon Artist” at the Art Basel Awards.

Featuring works from the Addison’s collection, Little Boxes invites viewers into a nuanced exploration of the square and the rectangle, two essential geometric forms that have served as powerful tools in artistic expression. The exhibition explores how the simple “box” serves both as a practical strategy for pictorial composition and as a symbolic container for complex narratives.

Chicago-born, internationally renowned contemporary artist Simone Leigh brings together diverse works from the Art Institute’s collections of African, American, and European art to explore the relationships between these objects.

With Margo Jefferson and Elizabeth Kendall

Even now, in her late 90s, Saar still speaks about this exhibition as crucial to her artistic practice. The earlier Black Girl’s Window might be considered the ‘hinge’ piece in Saar’s career, as a direct response to that Cornell exhibition as well as to the political and personal work of Black and feminist artists. It shows how after 1967, found objects for Saar seemed to become a conduit to a more subjective history and autobiography than she’d used before.

Drawing its title from poet Elizabeth Alexander’s book of the same name, The Black Interior considers the practices of artists who explore the domestic space as creative inspiration and refuge for one’s inner world. The works on view, all from CAAM’s permanent collection, reflect on the objects and memories of home. The shower, the closet, the phone, a photo album, a doily, a handkerchief, masking tape, and a magazine all become expressive materials or generative subjects. 

Sixties Surreal is an ambitious, scholarly reappraisal of American art from 1958 to 1972, encompassing the work of more than 100 artists. This revisionist survey looks beyond now canonical movements to focus instead on the era’s most fundamental, if underrecognized, aesthetic current—an efflorescence of psychosexual, fantastical, and revolutionary tendencies, undergirded by the imprint of historical Surrealism and its broad dissemination.  

By Jasmine Weber

The artist’s site-specific commission at the Huntington makes you feel like you’re floating in space, or suspended underwater. Standing in the gallery of Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, you are bathed in oceanic, cobalt blue light. The buzz of neon lights drones in the background. It’s hard to say if the temperature has truly dropped, or if it’s psychosomatic, that the atmosphere has cooled your skin just by the power of suggestion. You’re floating in space, or suspended underwater — gravity works differently here.

A newly established curatorial group—initiated by Betye Saar in collaboration with Roberts Projects—will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to preserving, interpreting and advancing Saar’s profound artistic legacy. Working closely with the artist, her studio and her longtime gallery, the Betye Saar Legacy Group will provide expert guidance on Saar’s decades-long practice and her impact on contemporary art history.

By Maxwell Rabb 

Betye Saar, known for her assemblages confronting histories of racism, has announced a new initiative to safeguard her legacy. The 99-year-old artist, in partnership with her longtime gallery Roberts Projects, has launched the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to stewarding her contributions to contemporary art history.

By Alex Greenberger

In February, nine curators received handwritten letters from the artist Betye Saar, who tomorrow turns 99. A legendary artist known for her assemblages attesting to histories of racism and survival in the face of it, Saar thanked the curators for their engagement with her work, then asked if they would help her look forward by helping create a “resource for future generations—curators, researchers, writers, and art historians—helping them connect with the heart of my practice.”

A newly established curatorial group—initiated by Betye Saar in collaboration with Roberts Projects—will serve as a scholarly committee dedicated to preserving, interpreting and advancing Saar’s profound artistic legacy. Working closely with the artist, her studio and her longtime gallery, the Betye Saar Legacy Group will provide expert guidance on Saar’s decades-long practice and her impact on contemporary art history.

 Motivated by the cultural renaissance occurring in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion, brothers Alonzo and Dale Brockman built a crucial space for emerging artists of color in 1967. Act on It! Artists, Community, and the Brockman Gallery in Los Angeles brings together dozens of works from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s collection, showcasing the range of experimental approaches to painting, printmaking, and sculpture featured at Brockman. 

By Ariana Marsh

One of the most celebrated artists in the medium of assemblage, Betye Saar was born in Los Angeles, where she studied in design. In 1967, she visited an exhibition by found objects sculptor Joseph Cornell, which radically impacted her artistic trajectory. She began lining assemblage boxes with her own prints and drawings, and filling them with found objects, creating pieces that addressed race and current events.

Betye Saar has been honored as a recipient of the Art Basel Award Medal. The Art Basel Awards are the first global honors dedicated to recognizing and advancing excellence across the contemporary art world — celebrating visionaries spanning the industry whose work is shaping the next generation of cutting-edge artistry. Path-breaking artists, cross-disciplinary creators in fashion, design, music, and performance; curators; institutions; patrons and foundations; writers and journalists; and the specialists behind the scenes, from studio managers to fabricators, are honored in Art Basel’s debut year of its landmark annual award cycle.

By Rachel Dukes

Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica has generated substantial buzz throughout Chicago since its opening at the Art Institute of Chicago late last year. Though the exhibition’s exploration of the Afro-diasporic solidarity movement has ended, its themes continue to reverberate at the Neubauer Collegium’s Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, which dives into the realization of Pan-Africanism through an oft-overlooked facet of Saar’s work.

In 1996, artist and philanthropist Susan Unterberg founded the Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) award, making a simple, yet radical commitment to redress the lack of institutional support for women visual artists over the age of 40. Showcasing work by a selection of awardees from AWAW’s first 25 years (1996 through 2020), this exhibition explores several themes surrounding anonymity and, ultimately, celebrates the transformative impact women artists have made on contemporary art since the award’s founding.

By Maximilíano Durón

In one corner of Roberts Projects’s booth is an installation by legendary LA artist Betye Saar that is re-created from a 1990 solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Sanctified Visions is dedicated to the memory of author Zora Neale Hurston and meant to mimic her childhood home in Eatonville, Florida. Sitting on a patch of sun-dried grass is a rocking chair that rocks, giving the sense that Hurston’s spirit is still with us. Carved into the chair are various animals and critters, a representation of Saar’s belief that we should live in harmony with these relatives, part of the fabric of life. Behind it is a wall of corrugated steel to which a window-like sculpture is affixed that is filled with found metal, chicken wire, a used artist’s palette, and more.

By Sam Lubell

Before the Eaton fire raced across Altadena, destroying more than 9,000 of its buildings, many, even in nearby Los Angeles, barely knew of the place’s existence. This sleepy 42,000-person hamlet hugging the glowing foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains is not part of that city but an unincorporated community of Los Angeles County, and just far enough off the beaten track to blissfully avoid notice.

Interview by Christophe Cherix

The Los Angeles fires brought back to my mind a conversation with Betye Saar about some of the very first etchings she made at home, right out of college. These prints often show charred vegetation rendered in beautiful color overlays, making the burnt wilderness glow in extraordinary shades of ochre and orange. Betye explained at the time that the house she had moved to, in 1962, was located in a canyon that had been devastated by fires three years earlier. When I heard she was safe back home, after having been evacuated for a few days this January, I asked Betye if she would tell us more about these early etchings, which in my mind had always been more about healing and resilience than destruction.

By Emily Steer

The stars reflect our lives back to us. For millennia, they have been used to locate humans’ position on the land; interpret our narratives; and communicate a world of feeling beyond the physical realm. For contemporary artists, stars are often used to bridge the gap between the scientific and the creative, the rational and the intangible. Their artworks reflect upon traditions of mapping and craftsmanship, creating glittering cosmos in rich textiles or unconventional materials. 

Flight Into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt 1876–Now highlights almost 200 years of this return-to-self. It’s a meeting ground of Black cultural production, a decidedly pan-African sensibility that engages with ancient Egypt as a spiritual point of reference for fashioning a collective identity; a source for inspiration and a site of affinity against the erasure of a cultural lineage. The exhibition, on view through February 17, 25, offers more than mythos, grounding itself in the promise of great origins reclaimed from a discipline of Egyptology that had categorized the civilization as “proto-European,” separate from the rest of continental Africa. The show’s aims are clear, but our means of flight remain as unresolved as these histories. Egyptian sphinxes don’t have wings.

A new commission from legendary artist Betye Saar entitled Seeking Secrets of Destiny was installed yesterday at the Legacy Gallery inside the expanded Legacy Museum in downtown Montgomery, Alabama.

“We are thrilled to have a newly commissioned piece from the legendary Betye Saar at the Legacy Museum gallery,” EJI director Bryan Stevenson said. “Ms. Saar’s lifetime of work on memory and history makes her latest piece perfect for our collection which uses art to reinforce learning about the legacy of slavery. We are also excited that her piece will be positioned next to a work from her talented daughter, Alison Saar.”

In conjunction with Betye Saar’s Mojotech exhibition for Getty’s PST ART: Art and Science Collide, Roberts Projects will hold a panel discussion on the intersections between gender, art and technology that have emerged over the last five decades. The title "Dear Genius" is taken from a letter sent to Betye Saar by her friend, Dr. Helen Anderson, when Mojotech (1987) opened at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center in 1987.

Panelists are Nancy Baker Cahill, Sarah Rosalena and Mindy Seu, with Jori Finkel as moderator.

The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture examines the role of sculpture in understanding and constructing the concept of race in the United States. The exhibition brings together 82 sculptures created between 1792 and 2023 and ranging in size from palm-sized coins to monumental statues created from diverse media such as bronze, marble, shoes, paper, and hair. Made by 70 different artists, these sculptures are displayed to allow for juxtapositions of historical and contemporary works that invite dialogue and reflection on notions of power and identity. American sculpture in its many forms also has served as an expression of resistance, liberation, and a vital means for reclaiming identity.

By Armand Limnander

In honor of the 2024 US Elections, Betye Saar has created a poster featuring a drawing by Saar, made in 1971.

Eight years ago, as the United States faced an unprecedented presidential election, we asked a group of artists to create the political posters they’d like to see. Four years after that, as Black Lives Matter protests roiled the country, artists of color shared with us their points of view. 

Betye Saar and Suchitra Mattai are some of many participating artists to donate works for auction in support of the Harris Victory Fund. The Artists for Kamala online sale will open on October 1st and conclude on October 8th. The sale will have both an auction component as well as some pieces sold on a fixed price basis. All funds raised will go directly to the Harris Victory Fund. 

By Zach Bernsten

Why It’s Worth a Look: Created during Betye Saar’s residency at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987, Mojotech (1987) is a pioneering achievement in altar assemblage. The sprawling exhibit intertwines ritual objects with circuit boards and computer parts, creating a potent display about the impact of technology on the natural world. Know Before you Go: The work is inspired by traditional accumulation practices in African sculpture, and visitors are encouraged to leave offerings at the base of the altar. 

By Lisa Wainwright

The artist Betye Saar (b.1926), a contemporary of Hammons in Los Angeles, has recently engaged with African art as a source for investigating numinous power. In Migration: Africa to America I, Saar tells the stories of a Black female diaspora, using several African figures alongside other nostalgic, found material. In an installation titled Red Time, she included African objects in a broader selection of masks from different origins, which were all mounted onto a dramatic cherry-red wall.

By Tara Anne Dalbow

Betye Saar has made art for over six decades, yet in many ways, her work feels more relevant and urgent than ever. Her intricate and inventive collages, assemblages, and installations, dating back to the 1960s, merge the political with the mystical, imbuing historical narrative with personal, ancestral memory. Comprised of salvaged objects as various as washboards, handkerchiefs, African masks, jewelry boxes, and window panes, her constructions interrogate racism, sexism, cultural identity, and national mythology.

By Evan Nicole Brown

The American assemblage artist Betye Saar spent her childhood salvaging lost, discarded and forgotten things, like small glass beads, broken necklaces and scraps of colored paper left in trash bins or littering the ground where she walked. Born in 1926, she was raised during the Great Depression and so, Saar wrote to me recently, she was taught to “use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without.”

On the occasion of its tenth anniversary, ICA Miami presents “Toward the Celestial,” a selection of works from its permanent collection highlighting the museum’s programmatic development, as well as recent commissions and previously unshown works. The exhibition is organized thematically, and journeys from microscopic to macroscopic images in order to explore the dimension of time and orders of scale. The exhibition’s title alludes to Betye Saar’s Celestial Universe (1988) banner, which was featured in the artist’s 2021 survey and has been part of installations of the artist over multiple decades suggesting both imminent presence and the recording of time through alternative ideological structures.

By Shelley Holcomb

There are few names that inspire as much admiration and intellectual curiosity as Betye Saar. A true vanguard in the historic Los Angeles art scene, Saar’s distinguished career as an assemblage artist has consistently pushed boundaries, intertwining history, memory, and emotion to forge a profound connection between her viewers and past generations. In an era where themes of identity are on the tip of everyone’s tongues in the art world, Betye Saar, at the age of 97, is not a newcomer to this discourse; she has, in fact, been setting the stage for us all for decades. 

By Emily Steer

Artists have been fascinated by the night sky and its dazzling cosmos for centuries. From Van Gogh’s trippy The Starry Night (1889) to Théodore Géricault’s eerie, green-tinged After the Deluge (1819) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s geometric Starlight Night (1917), many have attempted to capture the inherent mysteries of the universe as viewed from the ground. Some have taken it a step further, with Jeff Koons launching his mini sculptures to the moon using an un-crewed Odysseus lander this February.

Interview by Guy Trebay

"The main challenge, I guess, to being an artist is how to make a living. But being a creative person means you have to find ways to do this. I studied design at U.C.L.A., and after I graduated, I made greeting cards, I made jewelry, I got into printmaking and then sold my prints. I taught art classes in colleges all over the states. My creativity kept evolving with my needs as I got married and bought a house, had my daughters and put them through college. Through it all, I loved making art. It kept me going."

By Olivia McEwan

In "Constructing Whiteness," white walls ingeniously link to the text conceptually, explaining the extent to which the British cotton economy relied on the labor of enslaved people in the Southern United States. Nearby is LA-based artist Betye Saar’s I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1998), an iron shackled to an ironing board bearing an 18th-century diagram of the British slave ship Brookes, behind which is a cotton sheet bearing the Ku Klux Klan symbol. 

Hosted by the Department of African and African American Studies at Duke University, The Black Doll Symposium is a virtual, interdisciplinary conference convened to celebrate and discuss the exciting and varied topic of black dolls. We are thrilled to invite everyone in the diverse community of collectors, curators, dollmakers, scholars, and advocates of Black dolls to join us for two days of roundtable discussions, film screenings and audience Q&A sessions.

By Benjamin Sutton

This year’s edition of PST Art, the J. Paul Getty Trust’s recurring programme of exhibitions, events and scholarship, launches it's third edition on 15 September and looks at the intersections of art and science, featuring related shows at many of the city’s foremost galleries. While the entire lineup of gallery exhibitions that will be part of the PST Art programme has yet to be revealed, shows that are in store include Betye Saar exhibiting her large-scale, cyberpunk altar installation Mojotech (1987) at Roberts Projects, the dealer Jeffrey Deitch revisiting his major 1992-93 travelling exhibition Post Human and an exhibition dedicated to the environmental artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison at Various Small Fires.

By Mark Westall 

Referencing the tradition of accumulative sculpture that characterizes artistic conventions, Saar’s mixed-media assemblages emerge from a unique succession of gestures that meaningfully build upon each other. This process of accumulation takes aesthetic objects with profound epistemic weight—such as vintage wooden boxes, found objects and photographs—and thoroughly transforms them into mythical entities compounded by historical time.

By Lee Carter

In what is sure to be a highlight of Frieze Los Angeles this year, Eileen Harris Norton will debut her book All These Liberations in a panel discussion about the dramatic rise of the city’s contemporary art scene in recent decades, as well as the collector and philanthropist’s role as an indefatigable champion of artists of color, particularly women. The scholarly tome—edited by Taylor Renee Aldridge, a curator at the California African American Museum (CAAM), who will join the discussion along with artist Alison Saar—places Harris Norton at the heart of a burgeoning milieu of marginalized voices starting in the 1980s and traces the social and civic purpose with which she has approached collecting. That is to say, with boundless curiosity and compassion.

LA-based Roberts Projects will exhibit works by artists that interpret and/or subvert the idea of “oasis” from a range of perspectives: calm to nurture the human spirit and the hardships from which we seek refuge. A major highlight of the booth is Betye Saar’s neon work Oasis, which debuted at MOCA Los Angeles in 1984. This year marks the 40th anniversary of that transcendent solo exhibition of room-sized installations, which offered profound insight into tradition, spirituality and African American identity. For Frieze Los Angeles, Saar will also debut new works in an installation designed by the artist for Roberts Projects, which will be on view for the duration of the fair. 

Betye Saar is featured in Entangled Pasts: 1768 – Now at The Royal Academy of Art. The exhibition bring together major contemporary and historical works as part of a conversation about art and its role in shaping narratives of empire, enslavement, resistance, abolition and colonialism – and how it may help set a course for the future.

By Mara Veitch

As a child, Betye Saar witnessed the construction of the Watts Towers from broken glass, rusty tools, and seashells, and determined that history is best represented in the detritus of real people’s lives. Though she’s sworn off of deadlines, Saar has one more museum show in the works, Drifting Toward Twilight, now on view at The Huntington in Saar’s native Los Angeles.

Betye Saar's Under The Silver Moon is featured on Flaunt Magazine's 25th anniversary cover. When asked where was the most magical moon she's ever observed, Saar responded:

"Up at Yonderosa, my daughter’s desert ranch, there are many magical moons. The new moon that looks just like a sliver of a fingernail. Or the full moon that casts a shadow of the Joshua Trees almost like a flashlight."

Groove surveys over five hundred years of intaglio prints drawn from the extensive collections of the UCLA Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts at the Hammer Museum. The intaglio medium comprises engravings, etchings, dry point, aquatint, and mezzotint, all of which involve the use of a copper or zinc plate that is incised, inked, and printed. These materials and techniques have remained more or less the same since the fifteenth century. The exhibit includes examples of Renaissance engraving, through contemporary etchings.

By Stephanie Seidel

Celestial bodies, constellations and zodiac signs feature prominently in the work of American artist Betye Saar. Through ritual acts, she assembles syncretic spaces that incorporate spiritual, autobiographical and politically charged elements foraged from flea markets and the annals of history. 

By Maximilíano Durón

Tucked away in its own room in the Huntington Library’s American art galleries is a new commission (and acquisition) by longtime LA-based artist Betye Saar, whose childhood visits to the Huntington in the 1930s proved to be an informative experience. At the center of this blue-lit gallery is a 17-foot vintage wood canoe that Saar had had in her collection for a number of years.

By Hilton Als

The artist Betye Saar lives less than two miles from the bars, billboards, and bustle of Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard, but her home, in Laurel Canyon, seems far removed from Sunset’s gleaming capitalism and packaged sex. Saar’s studio and house, where she has lived for more than sixty years—she is now ninety-seven—are dedicated to history, especially American history as it relates to Black women.

A short documentary—produced by The Huntington and directed by Kyle Provencio Reingold, program director of Ghetto Film School LA—is presented within the exhibition, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight, at The Huntington. The film features footage of the work in progress in Saar’s studio, documenting her process of selecting natural materials in partnership with The Huntington’s Botanical curators.

Paraventi: Folding Screens from the 17th to 21st Centuries is an extensive exhibition curated by Nicholas Cullinan that investigates the histories and semantics of folding screens by tracing trajectories of cross-pollination between East and West, processes of hybridization between different art forms and functions, collaborative relationships between designers and artists, and the emergence of newly created works.

Betye Saar is included in Cooking, Cleaning, Caring: Care Work in the Arts Since 1960 at The Josef Albers Museum. The Josef Albers Museum Quadrat Bottrop, in cooperation with scientists from the Art History Institute at the Ruhr University Bochum, is showing a group exhibition that addresses historical and current issues in artistic discourses surrounding care work. 

Renowned American artist Betye Saar’s large-scale work Drifting Toward Twilight—commissioned by The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens—will go on view November 11, 2023, in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.The site-specific installation features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe and found objects, including birdcages, antlers, and natural materials harvested by Saar from The Huntington’s 207-acre grounds. 

Mapping an Art World: Los Angeles in the 1970s-80s revisits the decades leading up to the founding of The Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in 1979 and the opening of MOCA’s Grand Avenue building in 1986. Through the presentation of works from MOCA’s collection, the exhibition aims to reconsider the pivotal decades of the 1970s and 1980s, and to explore the spirit of experimentation and collaboration and the unique cultural and social landscape that contributed to and firmly established Los Angeles as one of the most dynamic art capitals in the world, and MOCA as an enduring presence for the city’s artists.

By Colony Little

While it originated in New York in the 1960s with Black literary activist Amiri Baraka, the Black Arts Movement quickly gained traction in Southern California in the wake of the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles. Drawing on new mediums flourishing on the West Coast, the Black Arts Movement as it manifested there put the focus on community uplift and radical change.

Illuminating concepts of identity, race, gender, and memory, Colliding Visions: Contemporary California Collage features 25 works by five Southern California artists – Chelle Barbour, Genevieve Gaignard, Patricia Jessup-Woodlin, Betye Saar, and Brenna Youngblood – whose unique viewpoints have been assembled as a visual conversation between the museum walls. Representing a range of styles in contemporary collage, all five artists use a distinctive combination of photography, cut paper, and found objects.

The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens announced today that it has commissioned artist Betye Saar to create a large-scale, immersive installation for the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art. Provisionally titled Drifting Toward Twilight, the site-specific work will feature a 17-foot-long wooden canoe that incorporates found objects, paint, neon, natural materials, and plant matter harvested by Saar from the Huntington grounds.  

By Ben Luke

Richly produced book documents how the nonagenarian artist’s work has been informed by her decades of travel. 

“My secret heart seeks the dusty, musty, forgotten corners. It constantly haunts, hunts, collects, gathers objects, images, feelings.”

By Catherine G. Wagley

Acclaimed artist Betye Saar brings her Heart of a Wanderer exhibition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through May 21. The 96-year-old artist is credited with “redefining Black consciousness in art.”

The artist Betye Saar lives up three flights of stairs in a house with a pink door, tucked into a Laurel Canyon hillside. She has lived in the canyon, one of few truly woodsy enclaves in LA, since 1962. “I feel lucky that I live up here in nature,” Saar, 96, said one afternoon in late February. She sat at her dining table while her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, a writer and the director of Saar’s studio, worked in the room next door.

By Carly Pippin

A Buddhist chant in an Indonesian temple. A bustling Moroccan marketplace. A Haitian Vodou ceremony.

In the 1970s, cultural encounters like these launched artist Betye Saar into a nearly six-decade love affair with travel. Now 96 years old, Saar has visited more than 31 countries, documenting her experiences along the way in vividly colored travel sketchbooks combining hand-drawn observations with knickknacks, ephemera, and found items collected from her destinations.

Betye Saar will sign copies of her latest catalogue Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues at Roberts Projects' new gallery location (442 South La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, two blocks north of Wilshire.

Betye Saar: Black Doll Blues features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Saar (born 1926) that incorporate the artist’s personal collection of Black dolls.

Special member-only screening of the documentary Betye Saar: Ready to be a Warrior, chronicling the life and work of the 96-year-old artist who, in her own words, is “an ordinary woman who does extraordinary things.” Diving into the decades-long evolution of her artistic language and exploration of race, gender, and social justice, the film pulls together interviews with friends, family, curators, gallerists, and fellow artists, as well as coverage of the 2019 solo exhibition Betye Saar: The Legends of Black Girl’s Window at MoMA.

An investigation into Betye Saar's lifelong interest in Black dolls, with new watercolors, historic assemblages, sketchbooks and a selection of Black dolls from the artist's collection.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar that incorporate the artist's personal collection of Black dolls. These watercolors showcase the artist’s experimentation with vivid color and layered techniques, and her new interest in flat shapes. While Saar has previously used painting in her mixed media collages, this is the first publication to focus on her watercolor works on paper.

Craft in America is the Peabody Award-winning series exploring America’s creative spirit through the language and traditions of the handmade. Two episodes entitled INSPIRATION reveal the magic and influence of craft. Featuring: Simon Rodia and Watts Towers; three generations of the Saar family: Alison Saar, Betye Saar, and Maddy Leeser; Hmong artists Suzanne Thao, Tousue Vang, Chef Yia Vang, and Mandora Young; textile artist Mary Little; weaver Diedrick Brackens; and potter Ayumi Horie.

Revisiting 5+1 is a reflection on the historic 1969 Stony Brook University exhibition and features work by the original six artists, all of whom were Black men, with an addition of six Black women artists, all trailblazers at a time when their work in abstraction was challenged by both the mainstream art world and Black art institutions. 

Photographs and archival materials exhibited alongside the work provide additional contextual history from this era of student protests and racial justice on campus. 

Spanning over two centuries from around 1800 to the present day, Black American Portraits chronicles the ways in which Black Americans have used portraiture to envision themselves in their own eyes. 

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, curated by David C. Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this book is a companion to the exhibition of the same name that reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters and spaces.

Joan Didion: What She Means is an exhibition as portrait, a narration of the life of one artist by another. Organized by critically acclaimed writer and New Yorker contributor Hilton Als, the exhibition features approximately 50 artists ranging from Betye Saar to Vija Celmins, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Maren Hassinger, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Jorge Pardo, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, and many others. The more than 200 works include painting, ephemera, photography, sculpture, video, and footage from a number of the films for which Didion authored screenplays.

The W. E. B. Du Bois Medal will be awarded to seven honorees “who embody the values of commitment and resolve that are fundamental to the Black experience in America” for their contributions to African and African American culture, the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research announced on Wednesday.

In Our Time: Selections from the Singer Collection includes a selection of paintings and works on paper collected by Iris and Adam Singer over the span of 16 years. Anchored by the work of 27 contemporary artists living and working in cities such as London, Beijing, New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, Accra, and Nairobi, In Our Time speaks to the immediacy of this moment on a global scale, as well as the key ideas, narratives, and concerns that artists have been exploring over the past 25 years.

Promised Land explores different notions of performativity, with special emphasis on how forms of popular culture and ritual converge with the representation of contemporary art. Here performativity is understood as an attempt to formulate various notions of becoming, reinvention, and enhancement of political consciousness as a condition of possibility to overcome the present of any struggle - individual or collective, socio-political or otherwise. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose.

Encompassing a wide range of media, subject matter, sensibilities and approaches, the exhibition will engage with the complexities and contradictions of approaching art through the lens of gender and the idea of “woman artist” as an easily defined or decisive category.

The moon has been bound to life and consciousness since the beginning of humankind. It has served elemental and vital functions such as providing light and measuring time, but it has also influenced the more ethereal and spiritual realms of gods, myths, and magic. This exhibition operates at the crux of a lunar spectrum, between the lure and mystery of the unattainable moon and the eternal quest to conquer the moon in its material form.

Featuring over twenty artists, the special exhibition This Is Not America’s Flag spotlights the myriad ways artists explore the symbol of the flag of the United States of America, underscoring its vast, divergent, and complex meanings.

Titled after Alfredo Jaar’s iconic 1987 work, A Logo for America, This Is Not America’s Flag provides a critical discourse on the symbol’s meaning, the complexity and contradictions of contemporary national identity, and artists as active citizens.

Given the effects of climate change, the global need for clean water, and the specific issues on the East End of Long Island, the topic of water is timely and important. In the exhibition, the theme of water is depicted as a natural element, a scientific subject, an issue of social justice, a historical factor, an ecological question, an aesthetic tradition, a metaphor, and a simple necessity for the existence of life on Earth.

Betye Saar's, Mystic Sky with Self-Portrait,1992 is currently on view as part of Creative Communities at the Harvard Art Museum. The exhibition features prints from the Brandywine Workshop and Archives. The collection spans the history of the workshop, from the early 1970s to today, and includes works by artists who had not yet found representation in the marketplace or museum collections when they arrived at Brandywine—a key constituency of the organization, which seeks to create opportunities for such artists. The exhibition is on view through July 31, 2022 at the Special Exhibitions Gallery, Harvard Art Museums.

ICA Miami welcomes Dr. Zoé Whitley, curator and director of Chisenhale Gallery, London, who will discuss the work of Betye Saar on the occasion of the artist’s exhibition survey Serious Moonlight. In conversation with exhibition curator Stephanie Seidel, Whitley will discuss Saar’s installations and the broader context of her work. Whitley most recently exhibited Saar’s works as the co-curator of the award-winning exhibition Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, initiated by Tate Modern in London in 2017, which toured throughout the United States until 2020.

The iconic artist on infusing her work with the mystical and recreating her mural LA Energy from 1983. Frieze talks to Los Angeles-born artist Betye Saar (b. 1926), presenting with Roberts Projects at Frieze Los Angeles. As one of the artists who ushered in the development of Assemblage art, her practice reflects on African American identity, spirituality and the connectedness between different cultures. 

Featuring historic images, text and archival materials, this publication accompanies the presentation, Betye Saar: L.A. Energy at Frieze Los Angeles, Roberts Projects Booth A12. 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.

The inaugural presentation in the Hammer Museum’s new works on paper gallery highlights acquisitions of prints and drawings from 2012 to the present. Over the last decade, through purchases and many generous gifts, the museum has built a robust collection in this medium. This exhibition shows, for the first time, many contemporary prints and drawings in the collection, ranging from the conceptual to the political, the abstract, the gestural, and the poetic.

America is haunted. Ghosts from our history are an inescapable and unsettled part of daily life. Not merely the realm of metaphor but present and tangible, urgently calling for contact, these otherworldly visitors have been central to our national identity. They populate our literature, our entertainment, and our art. This exhibition explores the numerous ways that artists in the United States have made sense of their own experiences of the paranormal and the supernatural, developing a rich visual culture of the intangible.

Featuring Wangari Mathenge, Otis Kwame Kye Quiacoe, Betye Saar and Kehinde Wiley

To complement the presentation of The Obama Portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald on tour from the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG), LACMA presents Black American Portraits. 

Remembering Two Centuries of Black American Art, guest curated by David Driskell at LACMA 45 years ago, this exhibition reframes portraiture to center Black American subjects, sitters, and spaces.

As told to Janelle Zara

With a solo show now on at the ICA Miami, the 95-year-old artist reflects on discovering her calling, finding acceptance, and history repeating itself.

‘An early work that stands out in my mind is Record for Hattie [1975], which is about my great-aunt Hattie Parson Keys. When she passed, I inherited her ephemera – notes, letters, dance cards, gloves, handkerchiefs – essentially her life’s mementos. 

On Sunday, May 30th, 9:30am PST (12:30pm EST) Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig. 

The Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst and Museum Ludwig acquired the assemblage The Divine Face from 1971 together with the Museum Ludwig for the museum’s collection as part of the prize awarded to Betye Saar.

Roberts Projects congratulates Betye Saar who will be inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters on Wednesday, May 19th at 4pm PT (7pm ET.)

The American Academy of Arts and Letters is an honor society of the country’s 300 leading architects, artists, composers, and writers. The election is considered the highest form of recognition of artistic merit in the United States.

The pioneering artist and her three daughters on family, creativity, and why being able to see beauty, even in difficult times, is the true mother of invention.

Betye Saar's career as an artist now spans seven decades. but in many ways, her work has never felt more of the moment than it does right now. Since the early 1960s, Saar’s prints, assemblages, collages, and installations, which often incorporate found and discarded objects, have radically explored notions of history, identity, racism, sexism, mysticism, and even the very nature of art. One of her best-known pieces,

Roberts Projects is delighted to participate in Art Basel OVR: Pioneers. A tightly curated presentation surveying two decades of Betye Saar’s iconic washboard assemblages, Dark Times looks to outline the historic relationships between women’s roles, the divisions of labor, and social class based on race. For Betye Saar, the washboard is a potent object that neatly coalesces the social constructions of gender, race and class with the politics of exploitation, opportunity and accommodation into one symbol.

Inspired by the late David Driskell’s landmark 1976 exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art, the documentary Black Art: In the Absence of Light offers an illuminating introduction to the work of some of the foremost Black visual artists working today. Directed by Sam Pollard (Atlanta's Missing and Murdered: The Lost Children) the film shines a light on the extraordinary impact of Driskell’s exhibit on generations of Black artists who have staked a claim on their rightful place within the 21st-Century art world.

By Shannon Lee 

At the start of 2020, it was impossible to predict that this year would transform the art world as we knew it. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic began to throw entire years of museum, gallery, and biennial exhibitions into the balance, and it may have forever rocked the international art fair circuit. In June, the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the art world and ushered in a long overdue reckoning with the inequity and systemic racism of the art industry.

By Patricia Spears Jones 

My runes are in ruins, little laughter here for my sarcasm
What to do, this chart confuses, conflates moon, which phase
And honey, local or from some exotic shore and what of money
My savings stuffed beneath deflating mattress. 

Join novelist, poet, and MacArthur Fellowship recipient Ishmael Reed for a conversation on the empowering role of art as a vehicle for reclaiming elements of African spirituality and culture. Reed has explored this theme in his writing, including in his collaboration with Betye Saar on A Secretary to the Spirits in the 1970s. He is the author of more than thirty titles including the acclaimed novel Mumbo Jumbo, as well as non-fiction, plays, and poetry. Six collages from the Morgan collection that Betye Saar made in response to Reed’s poems are currently on view in the exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response.  

By Katrice Dustin

Betye Saar’s 1972 work The Liberation of Aunt Jemima was once credited by activist Angela Davis with marking the beginning of the Black Women’s Movement. The piece—arguably Saar’s most widely known—depicts the mammy caricature of Aunt Jemima reimagined as a freedom fighter: a broom in one hand, a rifle in the other. 

By Jessica Lynne

Few artists have had careers as storied as Betye Saar’s. Her recently opened exhibition, Betye Saar: Call and Response, on view through January 31 at the Morgan Library and Museum, makes that abundantly clear. Saar’s work consistently challenges flattened representations of Blackness, instead articulating an artistic code informed by Saar’s maternal lineage, spiritual symbolisms, and cultural motifs that span the African diaspora.

By CCH Pounder

In the annals of art history, there is a tendency to see the “found object” as a raw material best suited for the cynical, winking gestures of Dada or Pop Art. But at the age of 94, Betye Saar has spent more than a half-century creating radical, poetic, socially textured assemblages by turning mere stuff into profound masterpieces: an ironing board, advertising signs, glass bottles, throwaway items often discovered at flea markets and thrift stores, and collected in her Southern California studio.

In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work into context. This week, we’re looking at a new piece by Betye Saar, known for her legendary work in assemblage, and whose solo show Call and Response opens Sept. 12 at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. Betye Saar’s new work is a collection of found objects, including a sarcophagus from Egypt and wood pieces from a local craft store.

Renowned artist Betye Saar defies description and categorization in her mixed media practice, which deals with her travels and personal history, politics, spirituality, and race. Saar is well known for her pioneering collage and assemblage-work in the late 1960s and 70s. In this visit, the groundbreaking artist talks about her sketchbooks and making art from “anything”—true to her assemblage-dominant practice.

Betye Saar is participating in Untitled, 2020. Three perspectives on the art of the present, conceived and curated by Caroline Bourgeois, Muna El Fituri and the artist Thomas Houseago.

Five years after Slip of the Tongue, conceived by Danh Vo and Caroline Bourgeois and presented at Punta della Dogana in 2015, this is the second time that an artist of the Pinault Collection has been invited to present his personal view of the collection.

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 explores what it meant to be a Black artist in America during two revolutionary decades, from the 1960s and the Civil Rights movement to the early 1980s and the emergence of identity politics. The story unfolds in thematic sections, with a special emphasis on aligned groups in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, and another focus on the work of Betye Saar. 

By Carolina Miranda

I’m starting with a throwback: a rendering by Betye Saar for a mural that occupied a wall on Fifth Street in downtown L.A. from 1983 to 1987. Located near the old headquarters of SoCal Edison at the base of Bunker Hill, the work, titled L.A. Energy, is now a point of inspiration for an online exhibition of Saar’s works on galleryplatform.la. Organized by Roberts Projects, the show explores notions of spiritual power.

The exhibtion catalog that accompanies Betye Saar: Call and Response, the artist's showcase of sketchbooks and related artworks, is a real treasure. Oragnized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the traveling exhibition features sketchbooks dating from 1970 to 2015. The show represents an important milestone for Saar, given it is the first exhibition at a museum on her home state of California to address her entire career and the first anywhere organized around her sketchbooks. 

Interview by Serna Altschul

In recent months 93-year-old artist Betye Saar has been cast in the spotlight, with glowing reviews for major shows at New York City's Museum of Modern Art (October 21, 2019 – January 4, 2020) and at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (September 22, 2019 – April 5, 2020.)  Saar's primary art form is assemblage – sculptures made from found items that she pieces together, often addressing spirituality and black oppression – that turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Correspondent Serna Altschul reports.

What might look like junk to the ordinary person is magically turned into compelling and memorable works by artist Betye Saar. In the exhibition Betye Saar: Call and Response, an ironing board takes on the shape of a slave ship, a cocktail tray becomes a tool for meditation and discovery, and a washboard—inscribed with “Extreme Times call for Extreme Heroines” and paired with a mammy figure holding guns—becomes a call to action. 

Betye Saar will be awarded the twenty-sixth Wolfgang Hahn Prize from the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst. This recognition of the artist, who was born in Los Angeles in 1926 and is still little known in Germany, is highly timely, the jury consisting of Yilmaz Dziewior, director of the Museum Ludwig; Christophe Cherix, Robert Lehman Foundation chief curator of drawings and prints at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York; and the board members of the association decided. For more than fifty years, Betye Saar has created assemblages from a wide variety of found objects, which she combines with drawing, prints, painting, and photography.

By Jillian Steinhauer

In 1969, Betye Saar made an artwork that would prove pivotal in her career.

Taking an old window frame, she filled its 10 sections with a constellation of images. Across the top three panels, she placed colorful printed moons and stars, evoking the night sky. In each of the six squares that follow she set symbolic figures, including an eagle bearing a shield with the word “love,” a map of a human head according to the pseudoscience phrenology, and a pair of skeletons, one white and one black. Below these, in the bottom half of the window, Ms. Saar painted the silhouette of a black girl, her eyes made from lenticular lenses and her hands — marked with astrological signs — pressed against the glass.

By Christopher Knight

In size, Betye Saar: Call and Response is a modest show. Just 18 sculptures and collages, plus a selection of sketches, are tucked into a single small gallery at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Resnick Pavilion.

The focus is on objects made in the last 25 years of a prolific career that was launched six decades ago. Since then, her work has been seen in more than 80 solo shows in galleries and museums.

Size, however, can be deceptive. Think of the LACMA gallery as a kind of one-room schoolhouse. Two lessons are on offer, both very big.

By Holland Cotter

LOS ANGELES — I ask the artist Betye Saar, who is 93 and set to open concurrent solo shows this fall at two major museums — the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art — if she has any theories as to why big-ticket attention is finally coming her way. She skips mentioning the obvious factors: She’s a woman; she’s black; she’s lived her whole life on what she calls “the other side of the planet” (Southern California). “Because it’s about time!” she says. “I’ve had to wait till I’m practically 100.”

LACMA trustee Eva Chow and actor Leonardo DiCaprio have championed the museum’s film initiatives since 2011, and they continue their efforts as the 2019 Art+Film Gala Co-Chairs. “Betye Saar is one of the most significant artists working today, and one who boldly addresses issues of race, gender, and spirituality,” said LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director Michael Govan. “Born in Los Angeles and having sustained a career over seven decades here, Saar has only begun to receive the international acclaim her work deserves.

By Leah Ollman

Betye Saar, who turns 93 in July, remains both an evolving and an emerging artist. She professes to want to work less hard, “to sit and look at the sky, or watch my garden grow, but still I have ideas.” Though her prints, assemblages, and installations have been exhibited steadily since the ’60s, attention to her work has burgeoned in the past decade, among artists of younger generations and curators internationally.

“In a remarkable body of prints, collages, assemblages, and sculpture, Betye Saar combines social commentary with spirituality, mysticism, and craft. Saar’s work and her indomitable spirit have been a beacon for many generations of artists,” said Elsa Longhauser, The Good Works Executive Director. Tribute presenter CCH Pounder added, “To observe Betye Saar is one of the great lessons in living an artful life.”

Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power 1963-1983 shines a bright light on the vital contribution of Black artists made over two decades, beginning in 1963 at the height of the civil rights movement. Soul of a Nation explores how social justice movements, as well as stylistic evolutions in visual art (such as Minimalism and abstraction), were powerfully expressed in the work of artists including Romare Bearden, Barkley Hendricks, Noah Purifoy, Martin Puryear, Faith Ringgold, Betye Saar, Alma Thomas, Charles White, and William T. Williams.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the Getty Research Institute (GRI) has acquired the archive of Betye Saar (American, b. 1926) as part of GRI’s new African American Art History Initiative. The archive, The Betye Saar Papers, ranges from 1926 to the present covering her entire career and her life as an artist. he archive includes documentation of Saar’s prolific artistic production and her notable works in diverse media: sketchbooks of ideas, concepts, and Saar’s travels; prints and drawings; book illustrations and commercial graphics, as well as profuse documentation of her assemblages and installations. 

Focusing on the work of black women artists, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It is the first exhibition to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color—distinct from the primarily white, middle-class mainstream feminist movement—in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

Just three months shy of her 90th birthday, Los Angeles artist Betye Saar gives a tour of her studio and explains what keeps her inspired.

A Constellation traces connections among twenty-six artists of African descent: eight who emerged in the mid- to late twentieth century, and who are represented in the exhibition by works from the Studio Museum’s permanent collection, and eighteen younger artists whose works are being shown at the Studio Museum for the first time. The works in the Museum’s collection serve as material and conceptual anchors exploring themes of the figure, formal abstraction, economy, African diasporic history and materiality.

Roberts Projects is pleased to announce the International Sculpture Center (ISC) presented Betye Saar with a Lifetime Achievement Award on April 18, 2018. The ISC’s Board of Trustees established the award in 1991 to recognize individual sculptors who have made exemplary contributions to the field of sculpture. 

Roberts Projects is pleased announce Betye Saar’s participation in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern. Spanning the period 1963-83, the exhibition explores how the category ‘Black Art’ was defined, rejected and redefined by artists across the United States. Betye Saar will be represented with iconic historical assemblage works in addition to an abridged installation of her 1973 California State University, Los Angeles exhibition.