Betye Saar, pioneering figure of Black arts movement, dies at 99

Artist Betye Saar, the pioneering figure of the Black arts movement, died on Sunday morning in her home town of Los Angeles. She was 99.Saar, a famous practitioner of assemblage, an artistic style that builds sculpture from everyday objects, was best known for reclaiming Jim Crow era memorabilia such as dolls and washboards and recasting them as images of Black liberation. Saar also worked in genres including printmaking and film, exploring themes from family to spirituality.“Her symbolically rich body of work has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists,” according to Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her.Saar began her career in design and shifted to art at the age of 35. She continued to make art into her 90s. Saar grew up in Pasadena and was part of a community of Black artists in nearby Altadena; she often cited Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers as an early source of inspiration.Throughout her career, Saar combed flea markets and yard sales for discarded objects showing how consumer culture depicted Black Americans.“My work has to do with recycling,” she told a documentary crew in the 1970s, according to the Los Angeles Times. “Each item I collect has a certain energy from its previous function that carries over into its new use.”She is perhaps best known for her 1972 revolutionary reimagination of Aunt Jemima, the image once used to market a pancake mix and syrup brand founded at the tail-end of the 19th century. Aunt Jemima was based on “mammy” images that depicted enslaved Black women as contented domestic servants. Saar’s Liberation of Aunt Jemima holds a rifle in her left hand, and a grenade wedged between her right arm and chest.Quaker Oats retired the Aunt Jemima image in 2021.Saar work also used natural materials gathered from travels around the world exploring the African diaspora and spirituality.“Wherever I go, I say, ‘What’s the alternative religion?’ because every country has it,” she said in a 2021 interview with the Guardian. “There are lots of other people that believe in magic and they have their own religion, and I was just really interested in what they did and what their ceremonies were, but mostly what the visual images would be.”Saar taught and mentored a generation of Black artists, including the painter Kerry James Marshall. Saar has long been considered a leading figure of the west coast arts landscape.In spring 2026, Saar was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.