BETYE SAAR: Uneasy Dancer

Milan, 9 August 2016 – Fondazione Prada presents the exhibition “Uneasy
Dancer”, a comprehensive survey of work by Betye Saar (Los Angeles, 1926). This
exhibition, hosted at the Nord Gallery, opens to the public from 15 September
2016 through 8 January 2017. The press preview will be held on Wednesday,
September 14, from 10 am to 1 pm. Curated by Elvira Dyangani Ose, “Betye Saar:
Uneasy Dancer” is the first exhibition of the American artist in Italy, and brings
together over 80 works including installations, assemblages, collages and
sculptures produced between 1966 and 2016.

“Uneasy Dancer” is an expression Betye Saar has used to define both herself and
her artistic practice. In her own words, “my work moves in a creative spiral with the
concepts of passage, crossroads, death and rebirth, along with the underlying
elements of race and gender.” This process implies “a stream of consciousness”
that explores the ritualized mysticism present in recovering personal stories and
iconographies from everyday objects and images. Several key elements lie at the
center of her artistic practice: an interest in the metaphysical, the representation of
feminine memory, and African-American identity which, in her work, takes on takes
on evocative and unusual forms. As Saar has said about her work, “It was really
about evolution rather than revolution, about evolving the consciousness in another
way and seeing black people as human beings instead of the caricatures or the
derogatory images.”

Betye Saar’s earliest artistic memory was stimulated by the Towers of Simon Rodia
in Watts, a suburb of Los Angeles she frequented with her Grandmother in the
1930’s. The construction of the Watts Towers, built over a period of 33 years, was
decisive in introducing ideas of how found materials embody both the spiritual and
technological. After graduating from UCLA with a degree in design, Saar initially
worked as a graphic artist before dedicating herself to printmaking, drawing and
collage. In the late 1960s, inspired by American Joseph Cornell, Saar’s work in
mixed media became increasingly three-dimensional, ultimately taking form as
assemblages by the end of the decade.

Through her confident usage of found objects, personal memorabilia and
derogatory images that evoke denied or distorted narratives, Saar developed a
powerful social critique that challenges racial and sexist stereotypes deeply rooted
in American culture. In the 1970s, her assemblages began to grow in scale,
ultimately becoming substantial installations and immersive environments that speak
to an approach uniting spiritual beliefs and faiths of all kind – from the intimate and
the mysterious to the universal - alongside politicized convictions.
Curator Elvira Dyangani Ose notes, “Saar’s works blur boundaries between art and
life, between physical and metaphysical. Spirituality in her work, does not only
resides in the works with which she addresses her concerns and her knowledge on a
myriad of traditions. On the contrary, it is to be found in the artistic exercise of
transforming common material in a sort of evocative new imagery, involving the
viewer in reminiscent fabulations of the real.”

“Uneasy Dancer” expands holistically on fundamental tenants of Saar’s practice
including memory, mysticism and the construction of socio-political identifiers. This
is none so much apparent than in the seminal work The Alpha and The Omega (The
Beginning and The End) (2013–2016), a circular environment alluding to the initiatory
journey and the experience of human life. This installation was specifically conceived
for “Uneasy Dancer”, and will include a number of newly created elements denoting
the idea of representing the whole of anything, from beginning to end.

Earlier assemblages involving objects inserted within boxes or suitcases, like Record
for Hattie (1975) and Calling Card (1976), take on a performative dimension even
when rendered in an intimate scale. Sculptural floor works utilizing cages, such as
Domestic Life (2007) and Rhythm and Blues (2010), simultaneously represent the
physical and metaphorical condition of segregation, and the increased need for
resistance and survival. These works specifically reference African-American
folklore, combining a political dimension with a spiritual vision that draws on a
multiplicity of traditions stemming from Africa, Asia, America and Europe.
The exhibition additionally highlights a series utilizing work tools and elements of
domestic life, such as washboards and scales, alongside either found or inherited
photographs, as in the works Mystic Window for Leo (1966), The Phrenologer’s
Window (1966) and A Call to Arms (1997). Spanning the length of several decades,
these aforementioned works reveal, on one hand, an intimate and autobiographical
condition, whilst on the other, allude to an imaginative, fantastical dimension. Saar’s
use of photography, treated here as a found object rather than a singular flatness, in
works such as Migration: Africa to America I (2006) becomes a way to celebrate
both the beauty and artifices of femininity.

Throughout her career Saar has engaged with a practice which, in addition to
opposing male chauvinist and Euro-centric thinking, supports a humanistic
perspective that reconsiders notions of the individual, family, community and
society.

The exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” will be accompanied by an illustrated
publication, edited by Fondazione Prada, with essays by the curator Elvira Dyangani
Ose and scholars Kellie Jones (Columbia University), Richard J. Powell (Duke
University), and Deborah Willis (New York University).
Betye Saar – Biographical notes
Betye Saar received her Bachelor of Arts from the University of California, Los Angeles in
1949, with graduate studies at California State University at Long Beach, the University of
Southern California and California State University at Northridge. She has been awarded
honorary doctorate degrees by California College of Arts and Crafts, California Institute of
the Arts, Massachusetts College of Art, Otis College of Art and Design, and San Francisco
Art Institute. Saar has been the recipient of awards, including but not limited to the the
Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles Distinguished Women in the Arts Award, the
Lifetime Achievement Award Visual Art, California African American Museum, the John Simon
Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and two National Endowment for the Arts.

Saar’s work can be found in the permanent collections of more than 60 museums, including
Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn
Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum
of American Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Los
Angeles County Museum of Art, to name a few.
Saar’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern
Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; De Domijnen, Sittard, the Netherlands; and
Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona. Saar was featured in eight Pacific
Standard Time exhibitions, including “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980”
at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.

Press contacts
Fondazione Prada
T +39 02 56 66 26 34
press@fondazioneprada.org
fondazioneprada.org