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, 1972’s The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which the activist Angela Davis once credited with sparking the Black women’s movement, recast the racist caricature emblazoned on bottles of supermarket syrup as a revolutionary warrior figure prepared to wrest herself free from that kind of oppression. (“She’s liberated! Finally at long last!” Saar posted on Instagram after Quaker Oats announced that it was retiring the Aunt Jemima brand name and logo—just last year.) At 94, Saar is in the midst of a period in which appreciation for her groundbreaking oeuvre is at a fever pitch, punctuated by pre-pandemic solo shows at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. But Saar’s proudest legacy is her family. Born in L.A. and raised in Pasadena, Saar was already a mother of two when she embarked on her journey into artmaking, and all three of her daughters—painter and mixed-media artist Lezley Saar, sculptor and printmaker Alison Saar, and writer Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh—went on to pursue creative careers of their own. In late March, Lezley, Alison, and Tracye gathered with Betye at Tracye’s home, not far from the Laurel Canyon neighborhood where the sisters grew up, to discuss coming of age in a house full of creative women and the role that art has played in their lives.