Artist-in-Residence

Betye Saar

Two women stand together smiling as one woman wraps the other in a large sheet of fabric with a design featuring hand-held fans and fish. Behind them is a larger print featuring dice, fish, hearts, stars, hands, and the moon over a gridded grey background.
Construction Technician Betty Leacraft wraps Betye Saar in her “Fantasies” print in front of “Takin’ a Chance on Luv’” at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, 1984. Photo credit: FWM Visual Archives.

A Los Angeles native, Betye Saar is celebrated as a pioneering artist for her works in assemblage that reclaim racist stereotypes about Black Americans and offer visions of unseen worlds. Saar combed personal and collective archives, reconfiguring images and artifacts to produce intimate, even liberatory, reflections on history, memory, and the complexity of Black life.  

The artist initially studied design, an academic field that she later reflected was imposed upon her. Noting that “Blacks and other minorities were not encouraged in the arts,” Saar found community within Black- and women-led art spaces. Not one for labels or limiting her practice, Saar eventually championed printmaking. Her earliest works on paper use the soft-ground etching technique. When creating these works, she pressed stamps, stencils, and found materials into her plates to capture their images and textures. Her prints are notably concerned with spirituality, cosmology, and family.

Takin’ a Chance on Luv’

During her 1984 FWM residency, Saar deployed the language of screenprinting to create an edition of duvet covers. In a possible reference to the 1940 Broadway jazz standard, Saar titled her work Takin’ a Chance on Luv.’  The design features a repeating fan pattern that circumscribes a cosmos of mystical symbols. Saar arranges dice, hearts, fish, a moon and star along a grid with energetic linework suggesting mysterious forces at work. An open hand with fingers each pointing toward its own celestial body indicates the artist’s interest in palmistry. Overall, Saar’s print materializes her spiritual belief in otherworldly powers and pathways to liberation.

She also extended her repeat pattern of alternating fans that makes up the border of Takin’ a Chance on Luv’ into its own sculptural wall installation, entitled Fantasies. This project borrows its name and motifs from a quilt Saar created a few years earlier in 1981 with the artist Judy Mathieson.

Movin’ and Shakin‘

Betye Saar returned to create a saleable edition as a benefit for the Workshop in 1987, the same year as her daughter Alison Saar’s FWM residency. Movin’ and Shakin‘, an edition of silk scarves, carries a similar composition to Takin’ a Chance on Luv’. With a familiar arrangement of dice, stars, and crescent moons at play, Saar introduces West African hand drums and beamed eighth notes among her frenetic marks. These motifs appear to dance and move to the rhythm of unheard music.

Art

From the Archive

Two women stand together smiling as one woman wraps the other in a large sheet of fabric with a design featuring hand-held fans and fish. Behind them is a larger print featuring dice, fish, hearts, stars, hands, and the moon over a gridded grey background.

A large artist studio with very long printmaking tables. A design featuring hearts, stars, fish, dice, hands, and the moon is depicted repeatedly along the tables. There is another identical table next to it with a different design, and several windows on the wall with sheer printed fabric overtop.

Artist Bio

American, 1926–2026. Lived and worked in Los Angeles, CA. 

Betye Saar, a leading member of the Black Arts Movement, was an American printmaker and pioneer of assemblage. The daughter of a seamstress, Saar focused her artistic practice on reclaiming objects, symbols, and histories. Saar graduated from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1949 before beginning her career as an artist and printmaker. Her honors include National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships; the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship; the J. Paul Getty Fund for the Visual Arts Fellowship; and a Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, NY, among others. In 1994, she co-represented the United States at the 22nd São Paulo Biennial in Brazil. Major solo exhibitions of Saar’s work have been presented at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Morgan Library & Museum, New York, NY; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; The Het Nieuwe Domein Museum, Sittard, The Netherlands; and at the Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy. Her works are in the permanent collection of numerous institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA.