Part of the reason why I started working with the figure was because audiences felt that if something was abstract that they were being excluded. . . . I have this naive sort of hope that my work could be understood by all people.
Alison Saar, in Ruth Twiggs and Bruce Berryhill, Alison Saar at VMFA / Tangible Spirit Part 1 and 2 (Richmond: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 1994/2014), video.
Alison Saar is a storyteller. In her sculptures, paintings, and prints, a woman’s body is a place of history and reflection. Incorporating found materials—like the tin-ceiling squares salvaged from demolished buildings in Harlem and recycled as skin in works like Deluge (2016)—she draws upon the cultural meanings embodied within objects. Overlapping experiences of the African diaspora, femininity, and personal narratives, she creates a sense of collective history within the female figure. Saar made Deluge—a sculpture of a woman’s head supported by a massive swell of hair made from baling wire—following an artist residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans. Struck by the lasting devastation of Hurricane Katrina five years after it hit the city, she made a series of work on the history of the 1927 Great Mississippi Flood.1 The most destructive in American history, the flood forced many Black Southerners to flee, joining the Great Migration to cities in the Northeast, Midwest, and California. Both ravaged and mighty, the disembodied head in Deluge is a site of convergent and collective history.
Video made on the occasion of the exhibition Alison Saar: Silt, Soot and Smut, at LA Louver, Los Angeles, posted February 5, 2020, video, 8:43 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=ukVx3NbaDic. ↩︎
Hair is an important personal and cultural symbol in Alison Saar’s work. For the artist, who is often mistaken for white, “it was always a struggle to have my African American heritage recognized. . . . the only part of me that really reflected that was my hair.”1 In her human-scaled installation Coup (2006), a woman sits in a chair, her hair woven into a ten-foot-long braid behind her that is tethered to a stack of suitcases. The word “coup” describes a successful, aggressive move (as in coup de grâce, a “blow of mercy” to put another out of their misery2) and is derived from couper, French for “to cut.” Grasping a pair of scissors in her hands, Saar’s figure is positioned to unburden herself of the baggage. When she made Coup, the artist’s two children had reached adolescence and were leaving home; she was also letting go of certain signature imagery in her artwork.3 Coup was first shown in an exhibition of the same name at LA Louver in Venice, California, where Saar placed another work nearby; Proclamation (2006), a long bronze braid severed and nailed to the wall, suggests that freedom comes with sacrifice.
Alison Saar, in interview “Alison Saar: Otis Alumna 1981,” Otis Legacy Project: Interviews of Distinguished Otis Alumni, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, March 13, 2008, video, 5:24 minutes, available at otis.edu/video/alison-saar. ↩︎
Linda Tesner, Alison Saar: Bound for Glory (Portland, OR: Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art Lewis and Clark College, 2010), 17. ↩︎
Alison Saar, artist lecture, “Duped,” at College of Fine Arts, Boston University, September 22, 2010 (posted November 1, 2010), video, 57:18 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=S5sLwN64m9k. ↩︎
Alison Saar crafts her work from found industrial materials like iron, tin, and wood, having learned form a young age that art could be made out of anything. Her mother—the artist Betye Saar, who is known for assemblages of symbolic and folk objects that reference spirituality, personal history, and American racism—was deeply influenced by Simon Rodia’s now-iconic Watts Towers, which she watched him constructing while on weekly walks to the grocery store with her grandmother. For Alison Saar, visits to the Watts Towers were a family tradition, and the elaborate structures made of rebar, concrete, broken ceramics, and objects from the dump were formative to her practice of using recycled materials.1 For both mother and daughter, working with discarded objects is not just a matter of resourcefulness but a kind of recovering of the life and spirit that all things have.
“Conversation with Betye Saar and Alison Saar,” Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power: Symposium, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, February 3, 2018 (posted March 12, 2018), video, 30:21 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=LvL9Es3Pp_I. ↩︎
“I’m a sculptor,” Alison Saar boldly states,1 though her art making encompasses various materials and mediums, including printmaking. Far from a preliminary practice, Saar’s prints reimagine her completed sculptures,2 and, as such, often depict solitary female figures reminiscent of Greek mythology and African deities and feature gestural marks typical of German Expressionism. “Being a sculptor,” says Saar, “I’m always . . . feeling the pull between the flatness of paper and wanting things to be more dimensional.”3 Employing the same visual strategies she uses in her sculptures, Saar often incorporates found objects and materials into the printmaking process, using discarded floor linoleum and pieces of wood as etching blocks. She plays with surface texture through techniques like collage, gluing pieces of found fabric to the print’s surface, and chine collé—for example, each of the bottles in Delta Doo (2002) is individually cut and bonded to the paper, creating a ghostly transparent effect. For Saar, printmaking is intuitive—she grew up watching her mother, the artist Betye Saar, study printmaking at California State University at Long Beach4—and has an immediacy that incites the artist’s experimental approach to making.
Alison Saar, in interview “Alison Saar: Otis Alumna 1981,” Otis Legacy Project: Interviews of Distinguished Otis Alumni, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, March 13, 2008, video, 5:24 minutes, available at otis.edu/video/alison-saar. ↩︎
Linda Tesner, Alison Saar: Bound for Glory (Portland, Oregon: Ronna and Eric Hoffman Gallery of Contemporary Art Lewis and Clark College, 2010), 25. ↩︎
Alison Saar, artist lecture, “Duped,” at Self Help Graphics and Art’s Biennial Printmaking Summit 2019, Los Angeles, posted March 16, 2019, video, 45:46 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=eyfCnCpbWuc. ↩︎
Alison Saar, artist lecture, “Duped,” at Self Help Graphics and Art’s Biennial Printmaking Summit 2019, Los Angeles, posted March 16, 2019, video, 45:46 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=eyfCnCpbWuc. ↩︎
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