Betye Saar

This volume features the Huntington Library and Museum’s commissioned site-specific installation Drifting toward Twilight (2023) by Betye Saar (born 1926). A solitary canoe drifts on a bed of brambles, illuminated by a cool neon glow. Inside, three passengers are transported to a mystical destination by two otherworldly beings. Guided by the dawn, the dusk and the phases of the moon, they transition from one cosmic reality to another. Part dreamscape and part altar, Drifting toward Twilight conjures journeys and the constant cycles of the natural world. Like cards pulled from a tarot deck, each object inside takes on a symbolic power: a monumental canoe, birdcages, antlers and plant material harvested from the Huntington’s grounds. This richly illustrated companion book includes a preface and a 1973 interview with the artist by author and longtime friend Ishmael Reed. Other contributions include a profile by Hilton Als and a new interview with the artist by Sóla Saar Agustsson, her granddaughter.

Showcasing a lesser-known aspect of Saar’s art, Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight provides new insights into her explorations of ritual, spirituality and cosmologies, as well as themes of the African diaspora. Featured here are significant installations created by Saar from 1980 to 1998, including Oasis (1984), a work that will be reconfigured at ICA Miami’s Saar exhibition for the first time in more than 30 years.
With compelling scholarship and rich illustration—combining new installation photography and archival material—the monograph provides a fresh look at this significant artist’s critical and influential practice. Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight reinforces and celebrates Saar’s standing as a visionary artist, storyteller and mythmaker, and the ongoing significance and relevance of her work to the most pressing issues in America today.
Betye Saar (born 1926) is renowned for pioneering Black feminism and West Coast assemblage in her visionary artistic practice, through dense, complexly referential objects. For over six decades, Saar’s work has led dialogues on race and gender, reflecting changing cultural and political contexts. Most recently, solo presentations have been hosted by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Saar’s work was prominently featured in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum, New York, and in Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at Tate Modern, London, which traveled to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Brooklyn Museum; The Broad, Los Angeles; and the M.H. de Young Memorial Museum, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

This volume features new watercolor works on paper and assemblages by Betye Saar (born 1926) 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.
“Watercolor is something that children use, so I decided, maybe I’ll paint something about children, maybe I’ll paint the dolls,” Saar says. Referencing the underrepresented history of Black dolls through Saar’s artistic lens, this catalog distills several intersecting themes, imagery and objects in Saar’s oeuvre, highlighting her prominent usage and reinvention of Black imagery. It contains 90 color images, including early assemblage works that feature Black dolls, such as Gris-Gris Box (1972) and Mti (1973), plus early sketchbooks and a curated selection of Saar’s Black doll collection. It also includes original essays by Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, and Katherine Jentleson, Merrie and Dan Boone Curator of Folk and Self-Taught Art at the High Museum of Art, and an interview with the artist by her granddaughter, Maddy Inez Leeser.

Made at a critical juncture in Betye Saar’s (born 1926) career, the enigmatic assemblage Black Girl’s Window (1969) was recognized by the artist as a crucial link between her past and future even at the time she made it. Saar has drawn upon family history, spirituality, astrology and politics consistently throughout her 60-year career, and all are present in the prints, drawings and found material neatly ensconced within the gridded panes of the antique window frame that is the work’s defining element.

This in-depth study by curators Christophe Cherix and Esther Adler expands our understanding of Saar’s early career and casts light on all that followed. Drawing on new research into the work’s construction and materials, and on firsthand discussions with the artist regarding the making of Black Girl’s Window and the themes behind her evocative imagery, this concise, generously illustrated volume explores one of Saar’s best-known and most iconic works.