Alison Saar

Visual and material manifestations of the human condition, Alison Saar’s (born 1956) figurative sculptures embody what art historian and critic Lucy R. Lippard terms her “guiding concept of the extraordinary buried in the ordinary.”1 Saar’s figures often appear to exist in liminal, in-between spaces – between dreaming and waking states of consciousness, at crossroads of cultures and stages of life, and at moments of choosing one’s path. While her figures often bear the weight of physical and psychic pain, she also grants them spiritual resilience.

Saar received much of her early art education from her parents, assemblage artist Betye Saar (born 1926) and ceramic artist and art conservator Richard Saar (1924-2004). Her father, with whom she worked as an art restoration studio assistant for twelve years, also introduced her to global art traditions and processes. Often quoted as feeling herself “floating between two worlds” as the child of a mixed-race marriage (her father was white), Saar says that she was initially referring to the worlds of reality and magic and also recognizes that this quote makes sense when applied to her background and the border crossing that infuses her worldview and work.2 Fascinated with the arts of multiple cultures, Saar studied African, Haitian, Afro-Cuban, and other African diasporic visual traditions with artist and art historian Samella Lewis (1923-2022) at Scripps College in Pomona, California. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1978, writing her senior thesis on art by self-taught African American artists. She began her graduate studies at the Otis Art Institute as a painter, then changed her focus to sculpture; shortly before she completed her MFA in studio art in 1981, Saar discarded much of her work and commenced making figures from wood with frescoed surfaces that she embedded with pottery shards and other cast-off materials. A 1983 artist residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem took her to New York, where she lived until 1995. Saar is the recipient of numerous grants and awards, and her work continues to be exhibited widely. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Like her mother, Saar works with a wide range of materials that are suffused with the accumulated associations and meanings of their past existence. These include salvaged and repurposed objects, tree trunks and branches, and embossed ceiling tin that forms the “skin” of many of the wooden figures she carves with a chainsaw and chisels. Whereas Betye Saar’s intricate collages, assemblages, and installations often gesture toward the mystical and metaphysical, Alison Saar’s work is more rough-hewn and down-to-earth. Art historian Judith Wilson emphasizes “her stress on grittily self-evident modes of fabrication as a means to evoke the art-making process as a revelatory struggle with resistant materials.”3 Though they manifest these sources differently, both artists draw upon history, multiple forms of expression from global cultures, music, folk stories, popular culture, and vernacular art for inspiration. They share interests in Vodun, Santería, and other African diasporic religious and spiritual practices, along with Mexico’s syncretic Catholicism and other religions that fuse Indigenous and imported belief systems in the Americas. For the younger artist, Central African Minkisi, figurative embodiments of power and healing, offer formal and conceptual possibilities for the sculptural expression of her subjects’ desires, longing, and the potentiality of their inner power – what lies “under the skin.”

When she moved to New York in 1983 for her residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Saar began sheathing her carved wooden figures with sheets of antique ceiling tin that had been discarded during renovations of the city’s tenements and industrial buildings. The patterned tin suggests scarification as aesthetic and culturally significant bodily adornment, and as the body’s protective healing of wounds that may be spiritual as well as physical. Some of these figures are freestanding and some, like her Untitled (Cadillac Angel), an assemblage from the mid-1980s, are staged with painted backdrops and props. Lucy Lippard writes of the characters such as Cadillac Angel that populate Saar’s art, “Alison Saar’s figures are spiritually powerful even when their lives may seem to include them in the ranks of the powerless. She talks about the ‘glory inside’ of apparently ordinary people, and with her art attempts to bring that element out through clothes, jewelry, and attributes.”4

Saar’s Cadillac Angel looks heavenward. His face, hair, garments, and wings are made of embossed ceiling tin overlaid on plywood that is mounted slightly forward from the back panel, reminiscent of the form of a Mexican retablo. He holds a car key, presumably to the Ford Galaxie 500 signified by the airborne emblem behind his head – or perhaps the Cadillac of the assemblage’s title. The sky behind this stylishly clothed figure is filled with clouds, floating cherubic figures, and objects of spiritual and earthly significance, including sunglasses, a diminutive human skull, and broken crockery. A fragment of the word “Hollywood” evokes a setting for this otherworldly tableau, populated with birds that fly and swim. Cadillac Angel thus occupies a crossroads, a place of transit between sky, earth, and water, for the cloud beneath his feet is also an island. Crossroads are “cosmic intersections,” writes Judith Wilson; “they are ideal sites for magical transactions.”5

Saar is also a printmaker who works with a variety of print processes. Like her sculptures, her prints are informed by multiple sources and art traditions. Along with her imagery, Saar uses materially resonant substrates such as sugar sacks to convey meaning in prints that are grounded in narratives of historical and contemporary Black experience and that address the persistence of racism. She has also made large-scale public works such as Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial, installed in Harlem in 2008 as New York City’s first public monument to an African American woman. With the ongoing impact of racism as their larger framework, her recent prints and sculptures reference ancestry and inheritance, Black women’s domestic labor, the natural world as a site of sanctuary and suffering, and environmental disasters that disproportionally impact people of color and people living with economic insecurity.

The interior and spiritual lives of her subjects, their passion, pain, resilience, and joy, rather than their appearances, are what matter to Saar. Her materials – the tree trunks and branches that she transforms into human figures, other substances from the natural world, and human-made detritus – bring their own accumulated histories into the richly evocative stories she continues to tell. In sculptures, prints, and installations, Saar invites us to contemplate a wondrous range of human existence and feeling at the crossroads of the ordinary and the otherworldly.

Melanie Anne Herzog