In a culture obsessed with youth, there’s no mistaking the meaning of the title of Betye Saar’s upcoming retrospective at the Scottsdale Museum of Art, “Still Tickin’.”
At 89, the lifelong Southern Californian is still busy making new work at her studio in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon.
She was a pioneer of assemblage art, using found objects to create collages and sculptural works, in the 1960s. And she was an important figure in LA’s Black Arts Movement, making a splash with 1972’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” which took the familiar “mammy” stereotype and armed her with a rifle and hand grenade.
Raised in Pasadena and trained in design at UCLA, she made the move into fine art when she discovered printmaking. In addition to her racial/politically themed works, “Still Tickin’ ” also looks back on her autobiographic art and her interest in mysticism. She spoke with The Republic/azcentral by phone from her studio, where she has worked for half a century.
Question: What got you started using found objects to make art?
Answer: My father’s mother lived in Watts, California, and as children during the summer we would visit her and walk to the marketplace to do her shopping, and we passed when Simon Rodia was building the Watts Towers. That was such a vivid imprint about, “What is this man doing?” He was an Italian immigrant who lived in the Watts area, and he wanted to build something like a tribute to his love for Watts and California and so forth. And he built these towers out of steel, covered them with cement, and in the cement he embedded shards of glass and anything else he could find. So that was my real introduction to mixed media, so to speak. He was like a recycler, taking what was thrown away and making it into a thing of beauty, a thing of interest.
Q: How do you procure your materials?
A: I like the concept of finding something and your imagination takes over, and you transform whatever you find into something else. I like the idea of just being inspired by the materials, and usually that’s the way my art pieces begin. I call it hunting and gathering. I go to flea markets, I go to antique stores, and I have a whole studio full of stuff, so I need to never buy another item, but you can’t resist something.
Q: So does your studio look like an episode of "Hoarders"?
A: I like things organized so I can find them, so I have a lot of little plastic boxes labeled, like, “Sun,” “Moon,” “Stars,” “Birds,” “Cars,” “Knives,” “Dice,” whatever. And so I can look in those drawers for smaller things, but larger thinks like cages and tables and chairs are on the floor or on shelves. I am planning to do an installation about rust, so I’ve been collecting rusty items. I have cages, I have all sorts of things. So that’s how I start. I start gathering things and accumulating, and one day I just feel like making something and start putting them together, and they turn out to be an object of art.
Q: What sparked your interest in Black collectibles?
A: In my hunting-and-gathering journeys, I started noticing the derogatory images such as mammies and pickaninnies and things like that, and I started collecting those. It was sheet music, it was postcards, it was magazine covers, it was books. I had seen things like that in the funny papers or ads, but I wasn’t aware that they were like a commercial thing. At that time there were also ones of Polish people, of Dutch people, all of those. But the ones that attracted me, of course, were the ones that used Black imagery.
Q: You started making art out of it after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
A: Seeing the way Black people were treated, the incidents with dogs and water hoses, the way people were treated just because they wanted to be able to vote and have certain liberties. Being a Californian and a young mother with kids, I wasn’t about to go South and participate in any of the marches — although some of my neighbors did. So I found this Aunt Jemima and I made that into “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.” That became my first piece of assemblage art that became political. And then I started a whole series using the derogatory images and transforming them from victims into warriors.
Q: You’ve lived a long life in Southern California. Were you ever tempted to move to New York or somewhere?
A: It’s a great place to visit, but I’m always glad to be home, because I like nature, and I live in a natural environment.
Q: Another major theme in your work is mysticism. Why?
A: As a kid I was always interested in fairy tales and magic and so forth, and I’ve always been attracted to other cultures, other religions, other ways of believing. I was interested in the hippie movement, and they had a lot mysticism and metaphysical things, palmistry charts and numbers and cards and so forth. And I like the old antique images of those. I did some research and I have lots of books on early drawings, diagrams of how to make gold, how to cast a spell, how to read palms and all of that. Those images really intrigued me, and I used them in my printmaking.
Q: In your image of a Black “Wizard,” there’s a pagan pentagram, a Star of David and an Egyptian Eye of Horus. Is there a hidden meaning or narrative in these works?
A: The hidden meaning is that we’re all people on this planet, and all those religions and all those cultures and all those symbols are just part of the different ways people express their lives. Instead of always looking for differences, accept those differences and put them all on, because they’re all here on earth with us.
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