For over six decades, Beyte Saar’s vivid and powerful assemblages have captured the timelessness of Black American storytelling and cultural history. Saar’s work not only places the viewer into the subject’s intense symbolism but

explicitly tackle certain themes, imagery, and spirituality that have embodied Black American generational bonds, and radicalism. Saar’s work intimately speaks to Black American daily life and spirituality, but more specifically to Black American women and their integral role in shaping their communities and their own voices. 

Born in 1926, Saar grew up in both the Los Angeles and Pasadena region. The vibrant and artistic atmosphere of Southern California gave Saar a multitude of artistic influences and interests.

Saar recounts in several interviews that while she was growing up she was particularly interested in the building of the “Watt’s Tower” in Los Angeles by Simon Rodia, which was created by a variety of materials such as broken dishes, seashells, rusty tools, and corn cobs.

Saar would soon find a passion for various forms of ephemera and became particularly fascinated by creating and repairing various forms of objects and materials. Once entering her adulthood, she had previously planned to be a social worker, but began to pursue a career in the arts, specifically in printmaking; one of the very few artistic professional careers available to women of color. 

Despite the racial and gender barriers she faced entering the white-dominated Los Angeles art world, Saar would soon thrive amongst the emerging Black artistic and creative movement by the 1960s.

Saar’s work during this time reflected a variety of influences that primarily stem from Saar’s African and Indigenous ancestry, along with a strong focus on spirituality that over the course of Saar’s career has become a staple motif.

It was following the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 and the rise of the Black Panther/Black Power movement that Saar’s work became more and more political and directly responded to the racism, fetishization, and eroticism that Black women faced by American society and media.

1969’s “Black Girl Window” showcases this shift in that Saar’s focuses Black girlhood and the racialized world that Black girls experience. This assemblage is made from an old window that serves as a medium to enter the thoughts of a Black girl’s head whose thoughts are placed in three-by-three window planes. 

The viewer is able to look inside the point of view of the Black girl’s inner thoughts which are being impacted by a variety of images that restrict the girl inside the window. The girl is restricted by the inner workings of her own thoughts that are a culmination of the oppressive world she was brought into that aims to suppress her and objectify her. 

The artwork can almost be described as “autobiographical” in that many of the symbols and imagery represent Saar’s ancestry and the challenges she faced growing up as a Black girl.

From this point on, Saar’s work became more and more focused on challenging and reclaiming racial stereotypes that have been placed on Black women across American history. Works such as 1972’s “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” exemplify Saar’s intense passion on moving Black female artists outside the margins and rejected the mainstream white feminist perspectives and ideals of womanhood. 

As Saar began dabbling in more political mediums of art, she also began to look towards her family and the importance of memorabilia, heirlooms, and everyday items that shaped not only her own experiences but the experiences of her ancestors. 

Saar told the Cleveland Museum of Art, “I feel that every object has its story about its previous life, and sometimes I change that, but I like to have a lot unsaid so the viewer can kind of reinterpret what I am trying to say.”

Saar’s work, which is a mixture of history, memorabilia, politics, racism, feminism, and family, is beautiful, and her different “genres” drew me to her art. I remember stumbling across a few of Beyte Saar’s work when researching about Black memorabilia and spirituality a couple years back and becoming immediately transfixed on how Saar’s work evoked feelings of familiarity and the never-ending passage of time that can only be described as nostalgia.

My most favorite of Saar’s works is a series of framed handkerchiefs, old photographs, letters, lockets, dried flowers, that Saar inherited after the death of her great-aunt. These items are arranged to create a picturesque shrine-like collage that strongly evoke the importance of generational mementos and the intimacy of passing down possessions. 

Growing up, I grew up in a family that placed an importance on being reminded of the past that has shaped the future of my family. My experiences of growing up in a family through the use of old daguerreotype photos and old family mementos and trinkets, has been crucial to my home and family life, which is why I was drawn to Saar’s work that expands across a multitude of intersecting themes of Black American life and imagery. 

At the age of 97, Saar is still creating new works that still tackle her thrive and commitment for the importance of Black American culture.