Betye Saar, assemblage pioneer who reclaimed racist imagery as Black feminist art, dies at 99
Betye Saar, the Los Angeles artist whose 1972 work 'The Liberation of Aunt Jemima' turned a racist mammy figurine into an armed warrior, died in her sleep on Sunday. She was four days shy of turning 100.
A life in found objects
Betye Saar, born in 1926 in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, died in her sleep on 26 July 2026 at age 99. Her longtime gallery Roberts Projects announced her death on Monday, noting she passed just four days before her 100th birthday on 30 July. Saar spent seven decades building assemblages from the discards of American life (furniture, statuettes, feathers, fabrics, birdcages) and arranging them to reveal the racial and political currents running beneath everyday objects.
Her practice began early. As a child visiting her grandmother in Watts, she watched the artist Simon Rodia construct his monumental Watts Towers from rubble, shards of ceramics, and cement, an experience she later cited as her first encounter with real art. She would go on to study design at UCLA and work as a printmaker and costume designer before turning full-time to assemblage in the late 1960s.
The Liberation of Aunt Jemima
Saar was in her mid-40s and already a mother of three when she created the artwork that defined her career. Her 1972 mixed-media work "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" was made for the exhibition "Black Heroes" at the Rainbow Sign Cultural Center in Berkeley, California, organized as a response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.
It was about the way African American women were treated as a sex object, as a domestic soldier.
The work centers on a grinning "mammy" figurine wearing a knotted headscarf and floral dress, set against a wall of repeating vintage Aunt Jemima pancake mix labels. The figure holds a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other. Embedded in her torso is a painting of a similar mammy holding a white child, over which Saar painted a Black Power fist. For its base she used a bed of cotton. Activist Angela Davis later cited the piece as "the beginning of the Black Women's movement."
I'm the kind of person who recycles materials. But I also recycle emotions and feelings. And I had a great deal of anger about the segregation and the racism in this country. And so this series sort of evolved.
A defining figure of the Black Arts Movement
Saar became a leading practitioner of the assemblage movement of the 1960s and 1970s, consistently using found objects to dissect anti-Black stereotypes and the history of racism in the United States. Her 1998 sculptural tableau "I'll Bend But I Will Not Break," on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's David Geffen Galleries, uses an ironing board as its base to layer references to slavery, slave ships, traditional women's labor, early 20th-century art history, and modern-day racism.
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, first exhibited her work in its 1983 inaugural show "The First Show" at the Temporary Contemporary (now the Geffen Contemporary). In 1984, MOCA presented 48 of her works in a disused brick gas station on the same grounds. MOCA called her "a master assemblage and collage artist who deftly integrated found objects into sculptural forms and ambitious installations that brought together the ordinary with the mystical, the political with the personal."
Institutional recognition and the centennial
Saar saw a surge of institutional recognition in her final decade. The Museum of Modern Art in New York mounted a solo exhibition of her work in 2019. MoMA director Christophe Cherix said he got to know Saar over that period.
All her life, Betye dismantled racist imagery, transforming it into a monument of black empowerment, resilience and resistance.
The Getty Museum called her "a pivotal figure in American art," and the Hammer Museum, which had honored her at a recent gala, reminded viewers of her influence on the Black feminist movement. Saar had been preparing for her centennial: in her final year she established a group tasked with preserving her legacy, creating what she called a "resource for future generations (curators, researchers, writers, and art historians) helping them connect with the heart of my practice."
A legacy of transformation
When Quaker Oaks retired the Aunt Jemima brand name in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed, Saar reflected on the half-century arc of her most famous work.
I transformed the derogatory image of Aunt Jemima into a female warrior figure, fighting for Black liberation and women's rights. Fifty years later she has finally been liberated herself. And, yet more work still needs to be done.
Saar's dealer Julie Roberts said her "singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art, and her legacy will continue to inspire generations of artists, scholars, and audiences around the world." She is survived by her three daughters.
