Browse Items (72 total)

In paper and print media, such as drawings and intaglio prints, Saar developed both conceptual and formal qualities that she employs throughout her career; here, the incorporation of mixed media characterizes works across Saar’s expansive oeuvre. In…

Acrobats is one of the prints produced during the course of Saar’s graduate studies at California State Long Beach, where she specialized in printmaking. Here we see an acrobatic troupe of undistinguished figures posed in a daring act of physical…

Much of Saar’s work explores the experiences of African American womanhood, emphasizing their independence. Here, a photographic image of a woman is situated on the edges of a cityscape while two men in colorful zoot suits stand contained within a…

Saar’s gestural print of a girl jumping rope escapes the charm typically associated with childhood play, instead infusing the scene with the vigor of the child’s rapid movement. The smudges of ink at the girl’s feet evoke dust kicked up by the rope…

Betye Saar regards the sky as an important aspect of nature and expresses its mystical aspects through a careful manipulation of form. Her fantastical rendition of the sky in LA–Saar’s place of birth–cannot be confined to traditional rectangular and…

Betye Saar states: “The stars, the cards, the mystic vigil may hold the answers. By shifting the point of view an inner spirit is released. Free to create.” Saar places symbols in her mystic sky: the decorative mask represents “hidden identity and…

Bookmarks in the Pages of Life is a collection of illustrations Saar made to accompany short stories by Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), a prolific author whose profoundly impactful works, such as Their Eyes Were Watching God (published in 1937),…