Throughout her career, African American artist Betye Saar has pioneered a highly original and personal aesthetic that transcends the strict categorizations of art-historical genres. Reconfiguring early surrealist influences from the likes of artists such as Joseph Cornell, Saar has painted, collaged, sculpted, and assembled to define a re-enchanted cosmology for our time as seen through her life experiences. To accomplish this, she staunchly resisted the white, patriarchal metanarratives of spiritual abstraction that, during the 1930s and 1940s, distilled the corruptibility of materiality from aesthetic utopian rigour, as visible in the work of Piet Mondrian and L\u00e1szl\u00f3 Moholy-Nagy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Saar\u2019s aesthetic knows no perfection, as the world she is enmeshed in is also far from perfect. Found objects, occult premonitions, shamanic rituals, and supernatural presences are markers of often imperceptible terrestrial and celestial entanglements that science has taught us to loathe as medieval hocus pocus. Saar articulates the integral facets of the human existence that have been marginalized from institutional language. Her interest in the supernatural in art is not the subject of her work but the medium through which she expresses an uncontainable desire to reach beyond the cultural impoverishment and brutal alienation of a world filled with hate, discrimination, and racism. \u201cI make my art in silence,\u201d she has said. \u201cThe materials conjure ideas. The ideas conjure images. The images conjure art. The art conjures feelings. The feelings are the goal.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Astral bodies, personal emblems, icons, and intricate symbolisms\u200a\u2014\u200aSaar\u2019s body of work speaks of a personal, intimate, and uncompromising soul-searching process. Objects from her childhood and others collected while travelling are gathered in her assemblages to connect past with present. Her mystical iconographies become keys to universalities that link cultures across the globe beyond the study of anthropology\u200a\u2014\u200aa primordial code that speaks a language of memory, longing, loss, and rebirth. In opposition to the hubris of the male artists that dominate the modern Western canon, Saar\u2019s work invites us to humbly heighten our perception of ourselves as part of infinite constellations of knowledge, wisdom, and empathy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n