Though a recent surge in interest is heartening, Betye Saar remains one of the most chronically unde
Though a recent surge in interest is heartening, Betye Saar remains one of the most chronically underappreciated artists still working today. This work, Black Girl’s Window (1969), represents many of the themes and artistic strategies for which Saar has become best known, including her symbolic language of mystical, personal, and religious imagery, her use of found objects in a distinct brand of assemblage, and her exploration and critique of representations of identity like blackness and femininity. Representing the transition in her practice from purely two-dimensional work in printmaking—drawing on her education and early career in commercial design—to collage and sculptural pastiche, Saar’s Window combines a worn-looking wooden frame with a central silhouette of a black woman and various etchings with symbolic and astrological content distributed throughout its smaller glass panes. It manifests the wide-ranging influences and inspirations Saar engaged with, from Joseph Cornell’s Shadow Boxes and Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers to the explosion of assemblage art in Los Angeles of which she was a central pillar; it gestures towards her complicated relationships with Feminism (a movement she denounced as white-supremacist) and Black Arts (whose imagery she often found essentializing). Saar was more interested in a personal mythology, resolutely political nonetheless. “The window is a symbolic structure that allows the viewer to look into it to gain insight and traverse the threshold of the mystic world,” she said.Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window, 1969 -- source link
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