Introduction
Saar attributes her exposure to metaphysical and spiritual traditions to her mother, a renowned collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar. Her interest in learning and her curiosity about foreign cultures were stimulated by helping her father, a painter and art conservator, Richard Saar, at his restoration studio (Gulla, & Sherman 2020).
At Scripps College in Claremont, California, Saar studied studio painting and art history and graduated with a BA in art history in 1978. She also earned an MFA in 1981 from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. Allison resided at the Studio Museum in Harlem starting in 1983 and began using the discovered artifacts from the urban environment.
Allison Saar’s Mentors
Long ago, Alison Saar made it her mission to use the power of form to effectively express her thoughts and feelings. Her sculptures communicate directly on history, ethnicity, and mythology using their own unique vocabularies. The stories that go with her sculptures are the lyrics to the tunes that captivate one’s soul.
The artist got attracted to the art following the kind of work her parents were doing. The Mother and daughter’s artwork has a number of similarities, such as a preference for used materials like scrap wood and metal, as well as a propensity for uniquely African-American religious expression. However, when Alison’s fashion sense deviated from her mother’s, she garnered attention in her own way.
Particular Medium Used by Allison Saar
Saar is proficient in a variety of creative materials, including wood, metal, fresco, woodblock prints, and works made from found things. Her sculptures and installations investigate the spirituality and cultural diaspora of Africa. Her work frequently incorporates personal elements and emphasizes the body’s historical function as a symbol of identity as well as its relation to current identity politics.
Her intensely intimate, sometimes life-size sculptures are distinguished by their emotional frankness, and by using contrasting materials and meanings, she gives her work a strong cultural undercurrent. Her sculptures illustrate gender and racial concerns using both historical background and her own personal experience. Saar looks into hoodoo, Santera, and candomblé rituals.
Artists Stylistic Development
Allison Saar’s exhibition, Sculpture and Works on Paper, features a selection of the sculptures and prints made by Alison Saar. Saar’s life-size free-standing forms, wall sculptures, and works on paper address themes of identity, fertility, and aging. Various found and repurposed materials, such as wood, old ceiling tile, tin, and tar, are used by the artist (Neilson, 2019).
The show is centered on Saar’s ongoing concern with the human condition, particularly that of women. Galileo named four bronze wall sculptures with the titles Sea of Serenity, Sea of Nectar, Sea of Moisture, and Sea of Fecundity.
Artistic Works Done by Alison Saar
The Montalvo estate’s grounds are home to the outdoor group sculpture installation Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape. The show features a number of pieces by regional and national artists that challenge the restrictive figurative traditions that rule old American gardens and other civic and public areas and redefine how the body is represented in landscape (Lundy, 2021).
Food is a physical necessity for living in the most basic sense, but its total value goes beyond just nourishment. Our communities, relationships, cultures, and languages all revolve around food. There are several ways that people engage with food.
A Site of Struggle describes how the artist handled and presented the idea of anti-black violence in America. The artwork was motivated by multiple pictures of the Africans who were suffering in the United States of America about one hundred years ago.
American artists have always been interested in coming up with creative methods to contrast images of African-American misery and death, which have long been a part of the country’s cultural environment (Lundy, 2021).
By examining the various approaches American artists have used to deal with anti-Black violence, from depiction to abstraction and from literal to metaphorical. The Montalvo estate’s grounds are home to the outdoor group sculpture installation Claiming Space: Refiguring the Body in Landscape.
Saar’s first mixed-media sculpture, produced in 1981, marked the beginning of her ongoing visual exploration of black diasporic history and culture. Si j’étais blanc (If I Were White), her debut sculpture, is based on a Josephine Baker song on inequity. A young black child is shown in this carved figurative sculpture sitting in a vivid red chair. The artist presents the kid with an open chest filled with shards of glass, alluding to the agony of Baker’s lament. This filled hollow invokes metaphorical Kongo minkisi (sing. nkisi), traditional holy items from the Congo-Angola area intended to bring about transformation, by drawing on black diasporic traditions.
Themes the Artist Emphasizes in Her Work
Themes from Saar’s work include black hair, gender, women’s power, race, and the kitchen. Her most recent exhibition in Los Angeles featured images of her artwork together with a tiny cookbook of family recipes. You may see Saar’s sculpture Kitchen Amazon next to a greens recipe. It’s a big naked woman covered in an ancient, rusty tin that was taken from the ceilings of former New York tenement buildings. The tin is carefully nailed to the carved wooden figure, like skin, and is embossed with designs. Themes that Saar’s mother has been working with for decades are echoed in her sculptures and prints. The fury of the civil rights generation is reflected in Betye Saar’s collages, and her daughter continues on that legacy.
Alison Saar Philosophy
Allison Saar decided to use the power of form to effectively express her thoughts and feelings. Her sculptures communicate directly about history, ethnicity, and mythology using their own unique vocabularies. The stories that go with her sculptures are the lyrics to the tunes that captivate one’s soul. Saar draws inspiration from a variety of sources while creating her sculptures, graphics, and paintings; these influences include German Expressionism, African, African American Folk Art, and old European art. However, the majority of the stories in her works are about the African-American experience, and they evolve with time as the times do.
Where Alison Saar Exhibited or Performed Her Work
Museums, biennials, galleries, and public art spaces have displayed Saar’s work. The UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, L.A. Louver Gallery, Phyllis Kind Gallery in New York City, Ben Maltz Gallery, and Pasadena Museum of California Art hosted significant exhibits of Saar’s work. Both The Studio Museum in Harlem and Dartmouth College hosted her as an artist-in-residence (Lundy, 2021). The Museum of the African Diaspora in 2015–16; The Fields Sculpture Park, Omi International Arts Center in 2014–15; Watts Towers Art Center in 2014–15; and Alison Saar: Bearing at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2015–16; Winter at The Fields Sculpture Park, Omi International Arts Center in 2014–15; Hothouse at the Watts Towers Art Center in 2014–15; which debuted at the Ben Maltz Gallery.
Conclusion
Alison Saar is a sculpture, mixed-media, and installation artist working in Los Angeles, California. Her work has been influenced by folk art and spirituality from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America and focuses on the African diaspora and black female identity (Neilson, 2019). For “transforming found things to represent issues of cultural and social identity, history, and religion,” Saar is renowned.
References
Gulla, A. N., & Sherman, M. H. (2020). Making Claims and Making Change: Creative Responses to the 1619 Project. In Inquiry-Based Learning Through the Creative Arts for Teachers and Teacher Educators (pp. 143-157). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.
Lundy, A. B. (2021). Changing the Portrayal of Black Female Bodies in Western Art: Anthropological Perspective (Doctoral dissertation, Florida Atlantic University). Web.
Neilson, C. (2019). Like Life. Sculpture, Color, and the Body (1300-Now). Sculpture Journal, 28(3), 415-419. Web.