Betye Saar is a renowned artist best known for her collages, which explore mystic iconographies as well as the reality of Black subjugation by combining ordinary items commonly used in the Black community.

Betye Saar

Her initial artworks were created on paper. She used stencils, stamps, and other objects pressed into plates using soft-ground etching to recreate their patterns and textures.

Saar’s art frequently featured her investigations into her personal racial identity as well as the communal Black identity. Her efforts to the evolving Black Arts Movement included the demonstration of spiritual and indigenous relics from Black cultures around the world to reflect the internal reverberations that can be found when investigating society.

Items such as washboards, ironing boards, clothes, or other symbols of domestic life emerge as homages to the role women typically played in households that have been refigured as portrayals of the innovated female voice, passing its boundaries. Saar has frequently drawn inspiration for her work from family and familial histories and traditions. Her experience as a woman in the surging Feminist movement also appeared prominently in her art.