Betye Saar takes the hands off the clocks in her piece Still Tickin’ to make sure you don’t miss it: Her work is timeless.
At 95, the Los Angeles-based assemblage artist is still creating new work. The touring exhibition “Call and Response,” on view now at the Nasher Sculpture Center, is the first show that pairs completed works from the last 50 years of the artist’s career alongside their original sketches.
“There are questions that a lot of people have when they’re looking at art,” says Leigh Arnold, who serves as the show’s managing curator at the Nasher. “What is the background of this work? What does the title mean? We don’t even have to interpret things when we have the sketchbooks there to show us what the artist was thinking. We don’t have to be there guessing.”
In seeing the evolution of the idea from sketch to object, viewers of “Call and Response” are able to work through the assemblages’ conceptual and emotional valences by following Saar’s breadcrumbs. It’s an act of care and generosity in a world that has earned the reputation of being erudite and inaccessible. And it’s in looking back and forth from sketch to object that you gain genuine awe for Saar’s particular genius.
Saar has been creating work since before my momma was born, and she is considered by many — including Arnold — to be one of the greatest living assemblage artists. Assemblage is a process much like sculpture, only instead of working from raw materials like marble or clay, artists assemble new three-dimensional compositions out of found objects.
Originally a printmaker and designer, Saar was barred from studying sculpture in graduate school on the basis of gender. Arnold explained that in the 1960s, working the costly materials of traditional sculpture was thought to be beyond the skill of women artists. Saar basically said, “Screw that; I’ll make work with whatever I can find.”
![Betye Saar's "Maid-Rite — I’se in Town Honey" turns a vintage washboard into a powerful...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/TTNJNQY3RNDYBHJPUUHNW45BOU.jpg?auth=59ecc2d2b85cdf6129a634afa52eeb91196146bb893b67db87eb561f2815afc9&width=430&quality=80)
Her reputation as an assemblage artist was solidified in 1972, when she submitted a piece to the Black Contributions Invitational: In front of a repeating image of Aunt Jemima, a mammy doll stands atop cotton holding a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other.
Although we do not see The Liberation of Aunt Jemima in this exhibition, we see her sisters in works like A Call to Arms and Maid-Rite — I’se in Town Honey. What is so powerful about Saar’s process of collecting, listening, making and revisiting is that she lends to each object — even derogatory ones — the dignity of being witnessed.
In her hands, disempowered objects speak out against anti-Black narratives, while new meanings are shaped through the relationships with the other elements included in the composition. Bullets become Mammy’s raised arms. Even Aunt Jemima’s raggedy headscarf can become a flag for revolution.
Saar’s willingness to view an object as a dynamic entity, rather than a static possession, is what gives her assemblages rare potency. Having been property once ourselves, Black folks know one thing: The object, too, has a story to tell. “Everything has a past,” Saar can be heard saying in one of the short documentaries that visitors can watch in the Nasher’s symposium room just outside the gallery space.
For her, nothing deserves to be thrown away or dismissed, at least not without listening first.
The exhibition’s title, “Call and Response,” refers exactly to that impulse. The show’s organizing curator and the artist’s biographer, Carol S. Eliel, says Saar is an extensive collector who feels that objects call out to her. After an object is gathered, Saar studies it and goes back to her existing collection to think about what might be in conversation with it.
From there, the response begins in the sketchbook as she makes drafts and notes about the composition, meaning, questions and titles.
!["The Divine Face," a 1971 mixed-media assemblage by Betye Saar, is the oldest piece in the...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/RLXOMPCYVJDNHOCIJULWKN7NQY.jpg?auth=46b039ead64f68417be28f9423dbb38bc8a420218266143355c1d53bdac7501c&width=430&quality=80)
Each of the 51 works on display — clock assemblages, altar pieces, delicate fabric collages, travel notebooks full of brilliant watercolor sketches — is a personal response to the complexity of Saar’s experiences with racialized and gendered violence, intimate family histories and enmeshment with the divine.
There’s a special pleasure that comes from deciphering the artist’s imagistic codex. A black crow symbolizes Jim Crow; a washboard represents undervalued female labor. Palms, eyes and hearts connect us to ideas of destiny and mysticism; bottles often represent spirits and ghosts.
“I think the chanciest thing is to put spirituality in art,” Saar said in an interview with Holland Cotter for The New York Times. Spirituality is one of the main arteries pulsing through Saar’s entire oeuvre. The term “call and response” also refers to the Black tradition of spiritual communication, from Vodou rituals in Haiti to Kirk Franklin gospel albums.
The familiar feeling of being called to the altar, so to speak, came for me after turning the corner to see Woke Up This Morning, the Blues Was in My Bed. The piece is recessed into an alcove behind the ironing-board assemblage I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, which first caught my eye when I entered the exhibition hall on the lower level.
Set against a black gallery wall, atop a low platform piled with black coal, rests a metal-spring cot. Blue glass bottles collected from divergent locales are arranged in snug vertical and horizontal groups, layered on top of each other. A neon blue wave undulates beneath the cot.
![Betye Saar's "I'll Bend But I Will Not Break" is among 51 of her works on display at the...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/VXLFTHCUANERFBXMAZM3YEFUBQ.jpg?auth=0308be0da6f7cbe39e23142319d35b95482cbb3d21021dc58d63821b93ec20f6&width=830&quality=80)
And maybe it’s because the coal reminded me of the dark sea floor. Or maybe it’s because the bottles are arranged in a pattern that mirrors the bodies of Africans sardined in that horrific image of the slave ship that Saar laid out on an ironing board in the work right before we rounded the corner — people piled on top of each other, breakable, porous, bodily fluids sloshing, seeping from one to the other.
Or maybe all Black bodies, including mine, whether we know it or not, are bottled up with this ancestral memory of what happened to us at sea. A measure of blues. An abstract wave, seemingly no more than a ripple, yet as large as the Atlantic just below the surface. It’s the bed we sleep on.
!["The Edge of Ethics," a 2010 mixed-media assemblage by Betye Saar, is on display at the...](https://dmn-dallas-news-prod.cdn.arcpublishing.com/resizer/v2/EHPLCEYGPRGJZK6LLWB3NNCCKE.jpg?auth=9d39bed3caab294ba952547426a96d7a12afad9438b8d65a4db98e90ef1aefcf&width=430&quality=80)
Woke Up This Morning, the Blues Was in My Bed made the hair stand up on my arms, this black and blue memory, so much more personal than the simplified contrast of black and white used to symbolize racial animus in other works. Saar had created a bruise. Like the Bessie Smith track the title references, this work is as much a song of love and intimacy as it is a song of incalculable sorrow.
I had seen in the online catalog the drafts of the artist’s initial and subsequent sketches for the installation, which span more than 12 years. It was a patient project that shows us Saar’s willingness to revise and even recycle. The cot originally appeared in two earlier works that were disassembled to make the 2018 assemblage shown in this exhibition.
Viewing this piece in person felt like a conversation, a call and response. Few artists have humility, and few exhibitions take the time to build trust with the viewer. But once I saw Woke Up This Morning, the Blues Was in My Bed, I knew I could trust Saar.
From there, I went back to the beginning of the exhibition and allowed my eye to direct me to the assemblages and watercolor sketches brimming with meaning, confrontation and comfort. Saar’s work is a reminder that Blackness does not begin and end with racial trauma in America. Our story is global. It’s cosmic.
Details
“Betye Saar: Call and Response” is on view through Jan. 2 at the Nasher Sculpture Center, 2001 Flora St., Dallas. Wednesday through Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. $10 for adults, $7 for seniors, $5 for students, free for kids 11 and younger. nashersculpturecenter.org.