In February, nine curators received handwritten letters from the artist Betye Saar, who tomorrow turns 99. A legendary artist known for her assemblages attesting to histories of racism and survival in the face of it, Saar thanked the curators for their engagement with her work, then asked if they would help her look forward by helping create a “resource for future generations—curators, researchers, writers, and art historians—helping them connect with the heart of my practice.”
“Your firsthand experience, insight and unique perspective make you invaluable in this effort, and I would be grateful for you to become a part of this Legacy Group,” Saar wrote. “It is important to me that future generations have access to the knowledge and perspectives of those who have been closely involved with my work.” Would her reader take part in a group charged with such a responsibility?
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All nine curators said they would, and have now signed on for an initiative known as the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which will help ensure that museums, art historians, and critics wanting to know more about the artist can continue to do so in the decades to come.
“It’s an amazing opportunity, and also daunting: how do you cover nearly a century of someone’s life?” said Zoé Whitley, one of the Legacy Group’s members. “But it’s a worthwhile opportunity to think about the many different people that that she’s known and evolved with. It’s very exciting.”
Whitley, who is currently writing a biography of Saar, will serve on the Legacy Group alongside all-star curators such as Museum of Modern Art director Christophe Cherix, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona director Elvira Dyangani Ose, and Mark Godfrey, who worked alongside Whitley on the exhibition “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which prominently featured Saar’s art.
Also in the group are Esther Adler, a curator of drawings and prints at MoMA; Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Milan’s Fondazione Prada, where he organized a Saar survey in 2016; Carol S. Eliel, senior curator emerita at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Diana Seave Greenwald, a collection curator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; and Stephanie Seidel, an Institute of Contemporary Art Miami curator who is currently doing her PhD dissertation on Saar’s work. They will assist Saar’s daughters—primarily Tracye but also Alison and Lezley, both of whom are artists—in helping provide access to documentation and archival materials kept by Saar over the years.
Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window, 1969.
Photo Jonathan Muzikar/Photo ©2017 Museum of Modern Art, New York/Museum of Modern Art
“Over the years I have worked with all of the members and they each have gathered a unique bit of know-how, a particular insight, about my creative process,” Saar said in a statement. “I look forward to future projects with this special group of individuals that I consider not just colleagues but also my friends.”
Julie Roberts, a cofounder of Los Angeles’s Roberts Projects gallery, which has long represented Saar, stressed that the Legacy Group is not a replacement for an estate or a retrospective, but a supplement to those things. (There is indeed a European Saar retrospective forthcoming in 2027, but Roberts said she could not state where it would take place.)
“She wants next generations—future generations when she’s not around—to still be able to speak about her work in such a way that they respect her wishes,” Roberts said in a Zoom conversation, adding, “it’s not just a retrospective, and it’s not just a biography. It’s looking to the future of what Tracye and I will need to carry us forward.”
The Los Angeles–based artist has been active since the 1960s and is today known for sculptures crafted primarily from found materials that she has amassed. “She took assemblage in a new direction,” Whitley said, adding, “Betye was able to see the world and then distill it into assemblage.” Whitley pointed out that Saar was friendly with figures such as the sculptor David Hammons, and that she has acted as a teacher to artists such as the painter Kerry James Marshall. “There’s just this fascinating nexus of thinking about her,” Whitley said.
Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972.
Photo Benjamin Blackwell/Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles/University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
She remains most famous for her 1972 sculpture The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, in which an Aunt Jemima figurine is equipped with a small broom and a tiny rifle, though Saar has continued to produce prints and monumental installations. (Saar kept archival materials related to this artwork and many others; the Getty Research Institute has facilitated an initiative separated from the Legacy Group that has focused on digitizing her archives.)
Roberts pointed out that Saar is still working, even as she is nearing 100. Having just won a lifetime achievement award from Art Basel, Saar will create a new installation for Roberts Projects’s Art Basel Miami Beach booth this December. “She just wants to spend her time making her art, and in her garden and with her family,” Roberts said. “She has transitioned her business to me and also her one daughter,” Tracye.
Betye Saar, Drifting Towards Twilight, 2023.
Photo Joshua White/©Betye Saar/Courtesy the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles/The Huntington
The Legacy Group’s mandate is deliberately unfixed because it’s designed to propel others to engage with her work. “It’s more about being at the service of others,” said Cherix, who helped MoMA acquire dozens of prints by Saar prior to becoming director this year. “I very much like the idea of creating a group of people who each have a certain type of experience, who understand maybe a discipline or a period of her work. Together we can really function as a group, helping people to keep better understanding her work and making sure that it remains on view as much as possible.”
Cherix, like the other members of the group, has spent significant time with Saar, and will continue to do so whenever he’s in LA. His work for the group will help others understand all he’s learned in the process. “If we can help people by sharing a little bit about our experience of working with Betye,” he said, “that’s a pleasure.”