“My secret heart searches for dusty, moldy, forgotten recesses./It haunts, hunts, collects, constantly gathers objects, images, feelings. In his 1993 poem my secret heart, Betye Saar – whose sculptures, using diverse cultural images to reflect on injustice and African-American life, form one of the most influential bodies of recent American art – tells us about the processes of witnessing , memory and collection at the heart of his work. Often, she draws on the experience of travel.
A map in the middle of this beautiful book, Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, details the artist’s travels over 50 years, trips to Morocco in 1968 and to Guatemala in 2018. Following are facsimiles of pages from her sketchbooks, the travelogues she kept, everywhere from her United States native to Haiti, Mexico, France, Nigeria, Egypt and Malaysia. Through drawing, collage and text, she reflected on her experiences, revealing how she had immersed herself in cultures new to her, engaging with their customs and the materiality of lived experience. “I love getting off a plane at one place and I don’t understand the language… I don’t understand why they dress [the way they do]. Right away I am on an adventure. Sarre’s reflections form much more than banal travel diaries; they shaped a singular work in recent American art.
collector of everything
heart of a wanderer concerns the exhibition of the same name at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston (until May 21) and accompanies the exhibition and the book Wandering Companionfocusing on Gardner’s travel albums, reviewed in last month’s issue (see “The grand tour education of an intrepid collector”, The arts journal, April 2023, p52). It’s an inspired pairing, especially since Saar had a residency at the Gardner Museum in 1994 and gave a talk there, noting Gardner’s “eclectic” habit of collecting everything from “musicians, artists, family.” to “fine arts, plants, all sorts of things”, and showcasing the museum pieces that interested him. She noted that these were “mostly the parts that seemed to relate to my builds.”
Saar’s sculptures, a combination of found materials and prints, drawings and paintings by her own hand, grew out of an early – almost innate – collecting impulse alongside the epiphanies she had upon encountering the works. other artist-gatherers. They include those of Simon Rodia Nuestro Pueblocommonly referred to as “Watts Towers”, these visionary structures made between 1921 and 1954 from existing elements and fabricated in South Central Los Angeles (where Saar was born in 1926 and grew up), and the brilliantly composed boxes of Joseph Cornell (1903-72).
Saar combines the composition of its various materials with a militant spirit. His most famous work, The Release of Aunt Jemima (1972) – which reuses a racist “mammy” doll, giving her a gun next to her broom – was born out of a need “to channel my righteous anger” at the loss a few years earlier of Martin Luther King, but also , she says, “to the lack of representation of black artists, especially black female artists.”
It’s as close as a mass-produced art book comes to an artist’s book – a coveted object in its own right.
Numerous other examples of his assemblages over the decades punctuate this book, in a tall and thin format, allowing them to be reproduced in such a way as to accentuate their rich materiality and their distinctive form. They each relate to the main event of the book: the facsimiles of the sketchbook pages, which are arranged in sections, on colors unique to the different continents, each section beginning with a die-cut frontispiece on one of the pages of the sketchbook. It’s as close as a mass-produced art book comes to an artist’s book – a coveted object in its own right.
In search of spirituality
The drawings reproduced here are never small sketches or annotations. Instead, many are pieces in their own right, using paint and wash and printed materials, from cut-out photographs to stamps and banknotes. In a wonderful page from her Haiti sketchbook from 1974, for example, she constructs a kind of sanctuary out of paint, graphite, a Haitian stamp and other objects. And as Saar said of his work in response to a question at this Gardner Museum lecture, “it’s spirituality I’m looking for.”
It’s spelled out here. As Diana Seave Greenwald, curator of the exhibition and the Gardner Museum, notes in her introductory essay, channeling these spiritual experiences of travel into sketchbooks and, ultimately, assemblages leads to “new experience…multiple facets for the viewer. Saarland “creates a new kind of delight,” she adds.
If the Gardner connection allows Greenwald to develop the correlations with the Boston collector – Gardner’s choice to place a 19th century Chinese statue on an 18th century Italian cabinet is a powerful testament to his own sense of assemblage – it also serves to highlight their differences. As Greenwald aptly puts it: Saar’s pieces “problematize the colonial networks, wealth disparities, and unequal power dynamics that facilitated Golden Age travel and museum building.”
Slavery
The point could not be made more powerfully than in Saar’s assemblage, ironically titled globetrotter (2007), in which a time-worn doll in a cage stands on a table above a globe.
Inevitably, this evokes the history of slavery. In her stunning essay, An Inner Me, a Looking Through, a Looking Into, Makeda Best, the new assistant director of curatorial affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, sheds light on the different ways Saar travels, as well as sketchbooks and objects it has produced. as a result, respond to African-American traditions and, as Best puts it, create “diasporic consciousness.” She alludes, for example, to the sketchbooks’ evocation of mojo or gris-gris bags produced as objects related to Hoodoo, the beliefs and practices of enslaved Africans in the southern United States.
Collage Green vision at the Villa (1994), with its corals, urns and green hues, is the Saarland vision of a lost civilization in the Mediterranean
Courtesy of Betye Saar and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles; photo: Robert Wedemeyer
Best explores scrapbooking as an urgent political act, a historic form of resistance to stereotyping among African American communities, and is also instructive on the particular qualities of collage versus assemblage. She reflects on Saar’s characterization of herself as a shaman, who “mixes and transforms information into another form”.
This spiritual element is also addressed by Stephanie Sparling Williams, a black feminist theorist and associate curator at Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, Massachusetts. In her essay Orientating Acts: Toward a Beauty and Mystery, she explores how Saar used travel to orient herself to place and culture and, in Saar’s own words, to act as a form of “medium, the link between the material and the message”. Williams takes a close look at the role of memory as Saar designs her work, which she connects to larger feminist cultural histories. She examines Saar’s patterns of object collecting and poetry, concluding that sketchbooks, writings, and assemblages exist “somewhere between ethnography and phenomenology.” Analyzing Sarre’s practices in the context of phenomenologist-philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, she argues that Sarre’s travels have led to a keen understanding of how the world is structured and, therefore, can translate this information, or ” orient” her audience towards what she has learned through her work.
This idea of translation is a crucial point throughout the three essays. Reflecting on the curiosity of Isabella Stewart Gardner, Saar observed “in our own path, we seek this connection between ourselves and others”. She added, “That’s what I would like to have in my job.” This beautiful book bears witness to how she achieved her goal eloquently and without compromise.
• Betye Saar: Heart of a Wandererby Diana Seave Greenwald (ed) with contributions from Makeda Best and Stephanie Sparling Williams.
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum/Princeton University Press, 208pp, 71 color illustrations, $45/£38 (hb), published April 4
