Betye Saar died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99, and the news landed with the same ugly old pattern her work spent decades exposing: Black artists make the culture, then the institutions arrive late, if they show up at all. Her death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week.
Who Got Left Out
Saar was a central figure of the 1960s Black Art Movement, and she spent her career turning found objects, Jim Crow-era memorabilia and the debris of American racism into work that refused polite forgetting. Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her, said her body of work “has evolved over time to demonstrate the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic, and historical context in which it exists.” The gallery also said her “appropriation of Black collectibles, heirlooms, and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion.” It added, “Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach.”
That praise came after a lifetime of making art in a system that didn’t make room for her. Saar began her career in design and shifted to art at age 35. She kept making art into her 90s. She 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. Her practice moved through painting, printmaking, sculpture and found objects including dolls, washboards and other antiques. Boats, clocks, cages and altars kept returning, along with symbols of the occult and cosmology. She often referenced her astrological sign of Leo in the form of lions, punctuating many works.
What the Institutions Missed
Made in 1969, “Black Girl’s Window” was groundbreaking. It wasn’t widely celebrated until decades later, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 2019. Saar once said, “There weren’t that many galleries in Los Angeles at the time and there certainly weren’t any for Black artists.” That line says plenty without needing decoration. The gatekeepers were there. The doors were not.
“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” created in 1972, stands as one of her most important works. Saar built it from memorabilia she collected that denigrated Black people, including a “mammy,” or 19th century minstrel character who smiled while serving white slave owners. In her hands, the figure is reclaimed: She smiles, but holds a rifle and has a hand grenade. The work came in response to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. Saar said King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior.” She also said, “I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these — thinking about how white people saw Black people, and how that influenced the ways in which Black people saw each other. What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure.”
What They Called “Order”
After more than 130 years, Quaker Oat announced it would retire its Aunt Jemima brand in 2020, acknowledging the logo and its origins were “based on a racial stereotype.” The company’s move came long after Saar had already ripped apart the image and exposed the violence underneath it. Corporate rebranding is a thin coat of paint. Her work had already shown the rot.
Saar taught and mentored generations of Black artists, including painter Kerry James Marshall. Though her work was exhibited in a 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, large institutions exhibited her work only sporadically in the decades that followed. In 2019, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA mounted concurrent solo shows. The museums eventually caught up, as museums do, after the work had already done its damage to the official story.
In spring 2026, Saar was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Angela Robinson Witherspoon, who produced and directed a documentary in 2023 on Saar’s life, said, “She had boundless energy for making art. I think she had a lot to say and was tired of the art world being dominated by white males.” Witherspoon said, “Betye Saar: Ready to Be A Warrior” features interviews with John Legend, Tina Knowles and other prominent voices. She also said, “She was raising her three young daughters and she wanted to be part of the Civil Rights Movement.”
“Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” which focuses on costume design, is currently on view at Robert Projects in Los Angeles, and a collection of more than 100 of her dolls are on view at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan. Even now, the institutions keep displaying the work they once ignored, as if delayed recognition can erase the years when Black artists had to build their own meaning in the cracks.