6July 29, 2026
Pathbreaking artistBetye Saar, whose powerful assemblages of racist memorabilia served up scorching commentary on the condition of the Black American—particularly the Black American woman—died on July 26 in Los Angeles. She was ninety-nine. Saar’s longtime gallerist Julia Roberts, of Roberts Projects, confirmed her death, which occurred at home, in the artist’s sleep, four days shy of her hundredth birthday.
Saar over the course of a career spanning seven decades drew on bigoted tropes as well as on mysticism, spirituality, and her own personal experience to create prints, installations, and assemblages that startled even the most complacent viewer into recognizing facets of racism that might have gone blithely unnoticed, or even been tacitly accepted, by a white public.
Evocative of her oeuvre is perhaps her best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972, in which she outfitted the smiling “mammy” figure familiar from pancake mix boxes with a rifle and a hand grenade. “It’s like they abolished slavery but they kept Black people in the kitchen as Mammy jars,” she told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “I wanted to empower her. I wanted to make her a warrior. I wanted people to know that Black people wouldn’t be enslaved by that.”
Betye Saar was born Betye Brown in Los Angeles, on July 30, 1926, the oldest of three children. Her father died when she was five and the family went to Pasadena to live with her maternal aunt, Hattie Parson Keys, whom Saar would go on to honor in her work. Visiting her paternal grandparents in Watts, she watched Simon Rodia construct his Watts Towers; the spires, created entirely of found objects, would profoundly influence her own practice, as she began to amass and alter items herself.
Saar began her career as a social worker but eventually swerved toward design. Having obtained a BA in the field from UCLA in 1947, she co-founded a design studio, Brown and Tann, with Curtis Tann, which the pair ran out of his home, selling decorative enamel objects through a loose community of African American artists. She married ceramicist Richard Saar in 1952; the pair would have three daughters before divorcing in 1970. During this time, Saar made extra money by designing and sewing costumes at her kitchen table.
In the late 1950s, she enrolled in Cal State Long Beach with the intention of obtaining a master’s degree in design so she could teach, but instead found herself entranced by printmaking and switched to fine art. A decade later, inspired by an exhibition of work by Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum) and by a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago, where she was fascinated by the institution’s deep collection of African, Oceanic, and Egyptian art, she began putting together her first assemblages.
An early work of this nature, Black Girl’s Window, 1969, shows a silhouetted figure peering from a window, its panes above her occupied by various symbols meaningful to the artist. Soon after, incorporating images of racist caricatures like Uncle Tom and Little Black Sambo, as well as other Black stereotypes that flourished during the Jim Crow era, and variously placing these in conversation with Black Power emblems and shamanistic icons, she began creating works of tremendous ferocity that exploded white notions of “acceptable” Blackness, characterized through the mid-twentieth century by a blend of foolish harmlessness and servility.
As the 1970s dawned, Saar, who was active in both the civil and women’s rights movements, found herself working adjacent to white feminism, which she rejected for its failure to acknowledge race. Her works of this era overtly resist both the oversexualization of the Black female body and, at the opposite pole, its defeminization, presenting Black women as strong, capable, and enduring, as in The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which activist Angela Davis later credited with sparking the Black women’s movement. “That became my theme,” Saar told The Guardian in 2021, “taking the negative and making it positive.”
Saar continued to work throughout the ensuing decades, producing ever-larger assemblages, such as the 1992 altarpiece Wings of Morning, and delving into installations, as embodied for example by the immersive House of Fortune, 1988. The 1990s saw the introduction into her assemblages of new, meaningful objects, chief among them the washboard, signifier of domestic labor. Saar continued to explore the character of Aunt Jemima. In 2021, Quaker Oats announced that it was discontinuing the brand bearing the character’s name and likeness. “She’s liberated! Finally at long last!” wrote Saar in a social media post. “And it’s about time!”
Saar in recent years enjoyed a resurgence of interest marked by institutional attention, with exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Prada Foundation, Milan. The Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art in Arizona awarded her a retrospective in 2016. In 2018, she was presented with a lifetime achievement award from the International Sculpture Center in New York.
Saar’s work is held in the collections of more than eighty major museums around the world. She is survived by her daughters Lezley and Alison, both artists, and Tracye, a writer, as well as six grandchildren and a red-footed tortoise named Rojo. A show of her costuming work is on view at Roberts Projects in LA through August 22; an exhibition exploring her influence on contemporary artists is up at the Palmer Museum of Art, State College, Pennsylvania, through September 13.