I first learned about Betye Saar in the context of her public criticisms of Kara Walker, an artist I

I first learned about Betye Saar in the context of her public criticisms of Kara Walker, an artist I had long admired. “I felt the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children,” Saar said in 1999, “that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.” What at first struck me as harsh made immediate, humble, urgent sense when I started spending time with Saar’s work, such as this sculpture here, perhaps her most important early assemblage that set her on the path to an iconic practice. While Walker’s antebellum imagery is at best ambiguous and at worst uncritical and problematic (at least when a white audience is considered), Saar’s approach to reexamining racist imagery is nuanced, incisive, and profoundly political. For over 60 years she has been collecting images and objects from her LA environs, often with an eye toward the products and icons that perpetuate racial stereotyping. Here, we see several versions of the Aunt Jemima figure, her exaggerated lips, skin, bust, and clothing embodying the worst of Jim Crow representation. In the middle image she performs the mammy role as a caregiver to white children; at her feet lies a bed of cotton. As the work’s title suggests, however, Saar has made a gesture toward “liberating” the woman from the consumerist cycles through which she is racialized and objectified, and instead presents her as an empowered figure armed with a shotgun and a pistol. She cannot escape the markings of a brutal racist history, but Saar offers a pointed, humble suggestion of what resistance to such imagery and the violence it reinforces might look like.Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972 -- source link

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