It’s a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I’m walking side by side with Betye Saar, the legendary Angeleno assemblage artist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement. She’s wearing a tonal gray sweater and coordinating pants with flashes of pale blue cheetah print (a perennial favorite of Saar’s) on her shirt and scarf, her silver hair twisted into a soft topknot, her fingers stacked with flea-market jewelry collected over decades. We’re joined by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.
We’re at Roberts Projects as Saar does the first walkthrough of “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” a revelatory exhibition opening May 30. Honoring Saar’s 100th birthday this summer, the show gathers more than 200 objects—including costume designs, garments, jewelry, theatrical ephemera, and photographs—to explore a lesser-known but deeply formative period of Saar’s life, reframing those works not as a side note to Saar’s assemblages but as the creative wellspring from which much of her larger practice emerged. (Other celebrations of Saar’s centennial this year include “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls” at the New York Historical Society.)
During the years the exhibition spans—the 1950s through the 1970s—Saar was raising her three daughters Lezley, Alison, and Tracye in Laurel Canyon while designing costumes for productions at Los Angeles’s groundbreaking Inner City Cultural Center. At the same time, she was teaching, making greeting cards and enamel objects for extra income, and sewing clothing for friends and family. “I never considered myself an artist [then],” Saar tells me later that afternoon, “always as a designer.” Yet she was slowly developing the visual language that would eventually transform contemporary assemblage.
Saar doesn’t move through the show with the heaviness of someone revisiting old glories. Instead, she repeatedly stops short in front of enlarged production photographs and costume renderings from decades earlier, letting out delighted little gasps as she recognizes a face, a fabric, a performer, a memory. “Ohhhh!” she says at one point, visibly thrilled by the scale of a blown-up stage image.
“I’m the kind of person that lives the moment and then I move on,” she tells me. “So I said, ‘Oh yeah, that was fun to make.’ And then to see it blown up, I said, ‘Oh boy, that’s fun!’”
Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar was only five years old when her father died, prompting her mother to move the family into her paternal grandmother’s home in Watts. On walks through the neighborhood, Saar regularly passed Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, seeing firsthand how discarded materials could be transformed into something monumental, even magical. “I was a person that never threw away anything,” Saar tells me with a giggle. “Even as a kid, my mother would say, ‘You’ve got to clean up your room.’ I would just hide things.”
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