Italian
immigrant Simon Rodia between 1921 to 1955 built
Watts Towers, in South Central Los
Angeles, an artistic masterpiece, a fantastical work of bits of tile, broken
glass, seashells and discarded crockery stretching nearly 100 feet into the
sky, considered "the most famous folk art environment in the
country".
Art
by Betye Saar is indebted
to Rodia's eclectic make-do vision. Saar favors a much, much
smaller scale, but the quixotic crafting together of unexpected objects known
as assemblage has long been her mixed medium of choice. Saar was the first
to use actual historical objects, sometimes known as ''black
collectibles,'' in her art.
Her
art is collected by institutions spanning the country, from the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art to New York's Metropolitan Museum of
Art and Whitney Museum of American Art.
You
get a flavor of the range of her work, and how she has added found or family
photos to the mix, in the current show at the Norton Museum of Art, Betye Saar: Extending
the Frozen Moment.,
the show includes 57 works from 1967 to 2004.
SAAR EXHIBIT
A VIEW OF BLACK
HISTORY VIA "BLACK COLLECTIBLES"
The
Miami Herald
By
Elisa Turner
Sun, May 21, 2006
'BLACK
COLLECTIBLES': Artist Betye Saar's
work addresses many aspects of the African-American experience while
incorporating actual historical objects.
As artist Betye Saar was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s,
an artistic masterwork was growing up in Watts, in South Central Los
Angeles: Watts Towers, a fantastical work of
bits of tile, broken glass, seashells and discarded crockery stretching nearly
100 feet into the sky.
Built by Italian
immigrant Simon Rodia from 1921 to 1955, folk art
experts Chuck and Jan Rosenak have called it ''the
most famous folk art environment in the country.'' Art by Betye
Saar is indebted to Rodia's
eclectic make-do vision. Saar favors a much, much
smaller scale, but the quixotic crafting together of unexpected objects known
as assemblage has long been her mixed medium of choice. Her art is collected by
institutions spanning the country, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to
New
York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American
Art.
You get a flavor
of the range of her work, and how she has added found or family photos to the
mix, in the current show at the Norton Museum of Art, Betye Saar: Extending
the Frozen Moment.
Organized by the
University of Michigan Museum of Art, the show
includes 57 works from 1967 to 2004. In a catalog with compelling essays,
organizers emphasize the importance that photography has played in Saar's work. They'd like to make
her work seem more in touch with younger contemporary artists, who find ways to
express their artistic visions with large-scale photography such as the
photography and video by Hank Willis Thomas and Kambui
Olujimi in metro pictures, now at the Moore
Space and the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami. The organizers'
strategy, to make Saar's art seem more
contemporary, doesn't completely work.
Both Saar and younger artists use
their art to address loaded racial issues and African-American stereotypes
marring popular culture and history in the 20th century and the present day.
You see that in Saar's Black Crows in the
White Section Only. It's a 1972 assemblage with vintage racist ads that are
appalling in their overtness.
Indeed, the
catalog says that the artist and scholar Jane Carpenter have argued that Saar was the first to use
actual historical objects, sometimes known as ''black collectibles,'' in her
art.
Such ''black
collectibles'' are part of Black Crows in the White Section Only. This
piece, displaying ads in a grid made from the panes of its found window frame,
still seems distant from the large-scale, up-to-the-minute and in-your-face
imagery by Thomas and Olujimi dealing with racial
profiling in current advertising and marketing. The Norton exhibit demonstrates
that Saar's work is an important
predecessor to work now made by younger artists.
In Lest We
Forget, The Strength of Tears, Of Those Who Toiled,
Saar has constructed an assemblage of three stacked
old-time washboards. One bears the painted relief of Aunt Jemima. The size of a
charm, there's no charm whatsoever clinging to this racial stereotype, shown
holding a machine gun.
Indeed, the size
of Saar's work detracts. Despite
the narrative and obsessively handmade qualities of her assemblages and other
works, such as the luminous Midnight Madonnas,
her small, tightly constructed objects can seem more restrained, literal and
fussy than the more widely hailed, expansive works by Kara Walker, who retells
slave narratives with scatological panache in her expansive black-on-white
cut-out silhouettes.
In the Norton
exhibit, there aren't any large-scale works by Saar on the order of what you
find by younger artists. Nor does video play a prominent role. Hardly an
old-fashioned thinker, Saar still makes art the
old-fashioned way. She produces relatively small objects that resonate with the
human touch. That sense of touch can be quite direct. Going through a trove of
objects left when her great-aunt died, Saar made art from her aunt's
vintage scarves and handkerchiefs, embellishing the fabric with long ago family
photos. The Loss, a mixed-media piece, is part of this ``hankie
series.''
Saar has also made assemblages with worn,
old-fashioned women's gloves known as the ''glove series.'' At the Norton is Keep
for Old Memiors, in which two wrinkled gloves
appear to massage an antique picture frame. Inside the frame is a collection of
old photos and hand-written notes. One note misspells ''memoirs'' -- hence the
misspelling in the work's title. A red old-school lady's glove also appears in
the more recent mixed-media collage on paper, Miss Ruby Brown, a
delicately tactile work that you almost touch with your eyes as you look at it.
As a collage, it incorporates old veiling, a dried flower and vintage printed
paper. It quietly suggests the elegance and reserve of another era, surely
redolent of an African-American woman's sense of dignity despite the Jim Crow
racism of an earlier time.