POUNDER: Do you tend to work on multiple pieces at once? Saar is eager to show me the new sculptures she is working on in her studio – a converted garage, for which she has no use now that she no longer drives. She ended up doing social work, then moved into the design field. You’re standing, looking at a gray wall with vines that had died, and you said, “I’m going to do a piece called—”. And she has held her own in a mainstream art market that has been, until very recently, unwelcoming to African-American art. Of course if your kid is ill, you can’t work on a painting. By combining them, they seem to carry the emotions of those who used them before me. It’s one of a whole number of individual pieces I’m working on. Hundreds of African slaves are drawn lying side by side on decks, with ceilings so low they could barely sit upright, far less stand. SA: Do the scales also relate to police brutality? Religion was woven into her upbringing. (She’s also called herself a “junkie.”) “I’ve been that way since I was a kid, going through trash to see what people left behind. Game of Fate, 2016, courtesy of the Artist and Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California. POUNDER: You’ve had a lifelong fascination with astrology. Of course they do not suffer as much as the person whom the racism targets. Others are symbolic self-portraits coded with personal and cosmological references. Beauty is a form of spirituality. Order prevails but clear surfaces are hard to find. I wanted to reinvent the unknown history of what those objects did. Saar was a part of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, which engaged myths and stereotypes about race and femininity. “Because people don’t understand it. Biography. Every religion has the Trickster in it. “My mother was Episcopalian. 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Her MoMA solo, “Betye Saar: The Legends of ‘Black Girl’s Window,’” which will debut with the reopening of the newly expanded museum on Oct. 21, is a survey of her rare, early works on paper — 42 of which MoMA recently acquired — supplemented by a selection of her assemblages. SA: For the Prada exhibit in Milan, Uneasy Dancer, you speak of the “creative spiral” of life, rebirth and death. The installation of Ms. Saar’s solo show, which will open the renovated Museum of Modern Art, includes early works on paper — 42 of which MoMA recently acquired. Most of the characters I create are from the past, before the 1940s. Because racism is still here. Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 The headline in the New York Times Business section read, “Aunt Jemima to be Renamed, After 131 … by another person. It has the ghost of the person, and I can create a new idea about art from these old objects.” — Betye Saar An African American artist who just turned 94, Saar grew up in Los Angeles and is well-known for her assemblage and collage pieces. An icon of assemblage art whose work has stood proudly at the intersection of the personal and political since the 1960s, Betye Saar draws from such broad references as the work of Joseph Cornell and occult traditions of palmistry and voodoo. A famous, indeed career-defining example, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” from 1972, was her response to the killing of the Rev. It’s because we were in Matisse’s house and he had a studio next door and vines were covering it. Photo: Rob Gerhardt/The Museum of Modern Art, New York; courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; © Betye Saar 2019. (Photo credit): Robert Wedemeyer, Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon studio, 2019. When we have a phase or interest, everyone looks out for objects that relate to it. Those derogatory images are still part of our country’s past which fabricated these images. Recently she’s had to do so many ‘silly interviews’, she says, she has been left with no time to work. depicted as black. But it was also a gift for me to recycle her things and tell stories. When I was making my new series, I thought, “Tears Are Not Enough,” what a sad title, and later realized why that title was so sad. ‘I find an object and then it hangs around and it hangs around before I get an idea on how to use it.’ Her intuition warns her off using certain substances, however. Socially, there is a duality of black and whiteness in skin color. Others are filled with watercolor paintings that are polished creations in themselves. ‘The way I start a piece is that the materials turn me on,’ she says. The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which hotwired a familiar emblem of American domesticity with radical militant politics, encapsulates the double consciousness of Saar’s life and work from this time.