Radical Woman Podcast- Betye Saar

Group B- Review 2

Radical Woman Podcast- Betye Saar

Betye Saar’s “Black Girl’s Window,” 1969. Her breakthrough work is the focus of an exhibition helping to reopen the new Museum of Modern Art.

Credit...

Betye Saar and Roberts Projects; The Museum of Modern Art

Hold on to your jelly bean. In an archived interview from the Getty Museum, Betye Saar speaks about her intimate experience with a UCLA professor the moment she finally gained an outsider perspective that she indeed is an artist. Given her career took place in the 1960s and ’70s, during the civil rights and feminist movements, it isn't shocking to hear that she had difficulties coming to identify as a female artist while also being a mother. With a background in printmaking and close influence from artist Charles White, Saar's work slowly finds a place in the art world after nearly 40 years, playing in the spaces between art and craft

Saars work analyzes her family's roots and past lives. Her work concerns objects that are often “leftovers of commodity culture”, pulling from traditional assemblage techniques;  exemplary of the influence gained from seeing Joseph Cornells work at the Pasadena Art Museum. In her exhibition, The Legends of Black Girls Window at Moma, there is wall text that reads “Windows, a way of looking out, a way of looking in”. This text parallels the way this podcast depicts Saars world; reference to the past from the present.  Saars work provides evidence of the way material leftovers can have a remade meaning and rebirthed aura. A persistent spirituality pays homage to Saar and her ancestors.