By: Christophe Cherix, Esther Adler, Cara Manes
Three curators who worked with Betye Saar reflect on her public and personal legacy.
In the life of a curator, there are moments that fundamentally reshape who you are. For me, that happened in 2019. That was the year I had the immense privilege of organizing Betye’s exhibition alongside Esther Adler for the reopening of MoMA. At the heart of that show was Black Girl’s Window, an assemblage built from an old, discarded window pane that Betye rescued from the side of a shed. Encased within its frame is the haunting silhouette of a young girl. Her hands are pressed open against the glass, her shifting eyes locked onto ours. Surrounding the girl’s silhouette are fragments of Betye’s own prints, created in the preceding years.
As someone who started in printmaking, I was deeply moved by how Betye used her prints as materials for a sculpture. Barred from studying sculpture because of the color of her skin, she took up printmaking—and brilliantly used it to engineer her own path into the third dimension. Today, her iconic Black Girl’s Window is on view in our fourth-floor galleries.
All her life, Betye dismantled racist imagery, forging it into monuments of Black empowerment, resilience, and resistance. In doing so, she became a beacon for generations of artists after her—starting right at home with her three remarkably talented daughters: Lezley, Alison, and Tracye.
We were profoundly fortunate to celebrate Betye in June at our Party in the Garden. It has taken a long time—the span of a rich and extraordinary life—to awaken us to a better, truer world. It is now our collective responsibility to carry her voice forward, and we could not be more grateful or more honored to do so.
Betye Saar is generally talked about in terms of her assemblage work, but for me, she will always be a printmaker first, and one for whom assemblage was an attitude more than a specific technique. I had already spent some time looking at her exceptional works on paper before I visited her studio with Christophe Cherix in the summer of 2018, and I had a lot of questions. There was so much going on in them, in terms of found imagery she captured on an etching plate, and I was having a lot of trouble visualizing how she did it. I remember the exact moment Betye said, “Hold on a minute,” and disappeared up the steps to another part of her studio. She came back down with a stack of small boxes which she started to open, and completely blew my mind. More than 50 years later, Betye still had all the stamps, stickers, bits, and bobs that she had pressed into a soft ground on an etching plate to create works like Lo, The Mystique City. Soon after, she found the actual etching plate for The Man from Phrenology; a few months later, I got a picture of the phrenology model that she had in her studio in the 1960s while making these prints. We were able to include all of this material in our 2019 exhibition of her work, hoping to share the same “aha!” moment with our visitors. This collecting and saving of materials of all kinds was inherent to Betye’s approach to art and her belief that objects hold their own energy and power. She may have set her printmaking tools mostly aside once she began using the prints themselves as elements in other works, but her faith in their energy and importance remained; they profoundly affected my understanding of her work many decades later.
The year I visited Betye in Los Angeles to look at her prints, I left my six- and three-year-old in New York. It was a short work trip, but I always found being away from them difficult, especially when they were little. This made me especially attuned to the other groundbreaking role Betye played in her life—that of mother and grandmother. And this was not a role distinct from that of artist. My favorite moment in a video the Museum made at the time of her exhibition is her response to the question “How do you handle being a mother and being an artist?” “What’s the difference?” Betye responded, in her typical straightforward manner. The idea that one’s work and parenting can contribute equally to what we spend our life building was profoundly influential for me, then and now.
If Betye’s body was not immortal, her spirit is. Like the boxes of studio materials she saved and shared, she continues to affect those of us lucky enough to know her—and future generations of viewers who encounter her work.
On February 27, 2016, the penultimate day of an exhibition I organized that brought together works from MoMA’s collection made from everyday materials, I took my three-and-a-half-year-old nephew to see it. Ever curious, Andronic, who goes by Andre, stepped into the gallery and beelined to Betye Saar’s Black Girl’s Window. He studied it, circled it, held the gaze of the lenticular eyes as they winked at him, traced the outlines of the hands pressed against the window, counted the many moons and stars, and then immediately declared it his favorite work of art.
As he roared like the lion at center left about to devour the sun, I told him I had learned that Betye included the lion because she loved astrology and was born under the sign of Leo. So was he.
A decade later, Andronic is spending Leo season preparing to begin a studio art curriculum at a special high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he now lives. He is an extraordinary artist, a maker of beautiful, complex, charged objects.
When Betye died on July 27, I called Andre. He said he hoped she died with the sun in her mouth.
“My studio is jam-packed full of everything that I think I might use—a friend once said, she’s a psychic—all these things in your room, they’re asking, ‘What are we doing here? What are we doing here?’” Betye once said. “And I say, ‘Don’t worry, one day you’re going to be art.’” Listen to Betye and her daughter, artist Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh, discussing the former’s works in 2019 on the occasion of her exhibition at MoMA.