Betye Saar

Betye Saar (born 1926) is a major American artist best known for her assemblages that link the political, the personal, and the spiritual, which she crafts from beads, old photographs, antique memorabilia, advertisements, window frames, and other found materials. A self-described “seeker of sanctified visions,” she is interested in the ancient civilizations of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Americas and in astrology, palmistry, phrenology, and the occult, elements of which she often incorporates into her work. Ritual, ancestry, memory, and identity are key themes, especially as relates to her own multiracial heritage as African American, Irish, and Native American. Since the 1960s she has been collecting derogatory images of African Americans from popular culture and reclaiming them—most famously in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Her daughters, Alison Saar and Lezley Saar, are also artists. http://www.betyesaar.net/