Promotional flyer for the edition The Mystic Eyes by Betye Saar, produced on the occasion of Saar being awarded the 2020 Wolf­gang Hahn Prize at the Museum Ludwig, Köln.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

“Betye Saar’s work occupies a pivotal position in American art. Her assemblages from the 1960s and early 1970s interweave issues of race, politics, and supernatural belief systems with her personal history. Having grown up in a racially segregated society, Saar has long held that art can transcend our darkest moments and deepest fears. Today, the emergence of a new generation of artists mining her poignant legacy attests to how profoundly Saar has changed the course of American art. The 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize not only acknowledges her extraordinary achievements and influence, but also recognizes the need to revisit how the history of art in recent decades has been written.”—Christophe Cherix, Guest juror of the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2020

Produced on the occasion of Straying from the Line at the Schinkel Pavillon from 13 April–28 July, 2019

Straying from the Line was dedicated to a fundamentally expanded perspective on the multiplicity of feminist tendencies in the art of the last 100 years. Instead of presenting a straight narrative of feminist art as a generation- and/or identity-specific style, the exhibition charted a network of multiple references, drawing connections between aesthetically and politically, geographically and historically heterogeneous perspectives.

Vito Acconci, Lynda Benglis, Dara Birnbaum, Jenna Bliss, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Teresa Burga, Tom Burr, Claude Cahun, Ellen Cantor, Tony Cokes, Anna Daučíková, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Nicole Eisenman, Ellen Gallagher, Jef Geys, Guerilla Girls, Barbara Hammer, Eva Hesse, Irma Hünerfauth, Mike Kuchar, Maria Lassnig, Leigh Ledare, Alice Lex-Nerlinger, Klara Lidén, Lee Lozano, Sarah Lucas, Ulrike Müller, Gabriele Münter, Anna Oppermann, Charlotte Posenenske, Tim Rollins & K.O.S., Aura Rosenberg, Betye Saar, Heji Shin, Marianna Simnett, Jack Smith, Nancy Spero, Diamond Stingily, Sturtevant, Martine Syms, Rosemarie Trockel, Anna Uddenberg, Raphaela Vogel, Constantina Zavitzanos & Park McArthur.

Inspired by Joseph Cornell’s assemblages and Simon Rodia’s Los Angeles monuments, the Watts Towers (made from found scrap materials), Betye Saar’s work mixes surreal, symbolic imagery with a folk art aesthetic. As a participant in the robust African-American Los Angeles art scene of the 1970s, Saar appropriated characters such as Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, and other stereotypes from folk culture and advertising in her works—usually collages and assemblages. African tribal mysticism, history, memory, and nostalgia are also important for Saar. She was invited to participate in “Pacific Standard Time,” a 2011 survey of influential LA artists, for which she created Red Time, an installation of her assemblages from both past and present that explored the relationship between personal and collective history. “I’m the kind of person who recycles materials but I also recycle emotions and feelings,” she explains.

Kellie Jones, in her essay ‘To/from Los Angeles with Betye Saar’ points out that Saar’s focus on the female body, a full decade before the pre-eminence of feminist art-making in the 1970s, speaks to her force as a member of the vanguard and the visionary.

A landmark exhibition on display at the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through September 17, 2017, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 examines the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. It showcases the work of black women artists such as Emma Amos, Maren Hassinger, Senga Nengudi, Lorraine O’Grady, Howardena Pindell, Faith Ringgold, and Betye Saar, making it one of the first major exhibitions to highlight the voices and experiences of women of color. In so doing, it reorients conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and art history in this significant historical period.

The accompanying Sourcebook republishes an array of rare and little-known documents from the period by artists, writers, cultural critics, and art historians such as Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, bell hooks, Lucy R. Lippard, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Lowery Stokes Sims, Alice Walker, and Michelle Wallace. These documents include articles, manifestos, and letters from significant publications as well as interviews, some of which are reproduced in facsimile form. The Sourcebook also includes archival materials, rare ephemera, and an art-historical overview essay.

In South of Pico, Kellie Jones (curator of Now Dig This, 2011) explores how the artists in Los Angeles's black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, productive, and engaged activist arts scene in the face of structural racism. Emphasizing the importance of African American migration, as well as L.A.'s housing and employment politics, Jones shows how the work of black Angeleno artists such as David Hammons, Melvin Edwards, Betye Saar, Charles White, Noah Purifoy, and Senga Nengudi spoke to the dislocation of migration, L.A.'s urban renewal, and restrictions on black mobility. Jones characterizes their works as modern migration narratives that look to the past to consider real and imagined futures. She also attends to these artists' relationships with gallery and museum culture and the establishment of black-owned arts spaces.