the matrix and the message

The Personal, Mystical, and Political Prints of Betye Saar

BY SOLA SAAR-AGUSTSSON

Printmaking was Betye Saar’s entrance into the world of fine art, and one of many mediums she would become known for in her six-decades long career. As a graduate student at California State University, Long Beach, she began creating prints in the early 1960s relating to her family and the natural world. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, her subject matter grew to encompass identity, mysticism, gender, and race. RINGGOLD | SAAR: Meeting on the Matrix includes works that speak to each of these themes in Saar’s oeuvre.

This exhibition features two etchings of her young daughters: Alison (1963) and Jump on One Foot (1964). Betye, my grandmother, told me that as a mother of three, she had to find the time to create her art somehow. Family time could double as studio time if she could, for example, draw her kids while they were watching television or jumping rope. A reporter once asked her what it was like to be a mother and an artist and she replied, “They’re both about creation. Overall, I approach motherhood as do art.”1

It was with this philosophy that her home in Laurel Canyon also became her printmaking studio, allowing Saar to transition from mother to artist when needed. My mother has memories of seeing printmaking acid in the kitchen at times. Her early prints depicting her family are composed not only from the perspective of a mother’s gaze, but also the embodied lived experience of motherhood. Jump on One Foot (1964) evokes movement, capturing the fleeting nature of watching your child grow up. Alison (1963) is drawn from the point of view of a mother looking at her child gazing up from her lap. Tender but visionary, her early prints lay the groundwork for Saar’s unique voice as a black feminist icon who created art simultaneously about the personal and the political.

During the late 1960s, she became interested in astrology, palmistry, and the occult. Although she was drawn to the aesthetic of mysticism, she was never a traditional practitioner. Known for recycling found materials, she sometimes reincorporated pieces of older prints or sketches into her window assemblages and used recurring mystical symbols in her work throughout her career. The Mystic Galaxy (1966), one of her signature prints that includes imagery of the sun, moon, and stars, would be partially reincorporated into Black Girl’s Window (1968), one of her most well-known works. LA Sky (1989) and Mystic Sky with Self Portrait (1992) represent a playful and colorful interpretation of these symbols. In the latter, she included a rendering of her face into the corner of the

1 https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/arts-and-culture/a34346786/betye-saar-artist-motherhood/ piece, situating the symbols abstractly as if ideas were floating in Saar’s head.

Saar utilizes found imagery of black figures of the past, such as Aunt Jemima, as a lens through which to see the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow. In National Racism: We was mostly ‘bout Survival (1998), a faded image of an enslaved woman ironing is centered on a washboard, an object that typically signifies servitude, transformed into a portrait of someone whose reality is rarely subjectified. Juxtaposing the ubiquitous household washboard used by enslaved people and domestic servants with an adage and her “Liberate Aunt Jemima” slogan, Saar gives dignity to the black ancestral struggle for survival.

Printmaking is a democratic artistic medium which lends itself to conveying political messages by virtue of allowing its imagery to be reproduced and viewed by wider audiences. Faith Ringgold, who designed posters for the Black Panther Party, also used this medium to connect artistry and activism. The matrix of printmaking almost never gets exhibited, but serves as a blueprint, a prototype to be replicated but always hidden. Ironically, in creating a matrix—a mold—both artists also managed to break it.