The Tamesis
It’s a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I’m walking side by side with Betye Saar, the legendary Los Angeles assemblage artist and central figure in the West Coast Black Arts Movement. She’s wearing a tonal gray sweater and matching pants, with a pale blue cheetah print on the shirt and scarf (Sal’s all-time favorite), her silver hair in a soft bun, and her fingers covered in jewelry collected from decades of flea markets. We were joined by her long-time gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.
We’re at Roberts Projects, where Sal is debuting “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betty Sal,” a revelatory exhibition opening May 30. To mark Sal’s 100th birthday this summer, the exhibition collects more than 200 objects, including costume designs, costumes, jewelry, theatrical ephemera and photographs, to explore a little-known but seminal period of Sal’s life. Reconstructing these works is not a side note to Saar’s work, but rather serves as a creative source for many of her large-scale practices. (Other celebrations this year for the centennial of Saar’s birth include the New-York Historical Society’s “The Black Dolls of Bétiere Saar.”)
The exhibition spans the 1950s to the 1970s, as Sal raised her three daughters, Lezley, Alison and Tracye, in Laurel Canyon while designing costumes for productions at Los Angeles’ groundbreaking Inner City Cultural Center. At the same time, she taught, made greeting cards and enamel items for extra income, and sewed clothes for friends and family. “I never thought of myself as an artist [then]Later that afternoon, Sal told me, “Always a designer.” Yet she was slowly developing a visual language that would eventually transform contemporary assemblages.
Sal doesn’t go through the show with a heavy heart reliving past glory. Instead, she kept pausing at blown-up production photos and costume renderings from decades ago, letting out a gasp of pleasure as she recognized a face, a piece of fabric, a performer, a memory. “Ooooh!” she said at one point, clearly excited by the scale of the enlarged stage image.
“I’m the kind of person who lives in the moment and moves on,” she told me. “So I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, that was fun to make.’ And then seeing it blow up, I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, that was so much fun!'”
Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Sal was five years old when her father died, causing her mother to move the family to her grandmother’s home in Watts. On walks in the neighborhood, Sal often passed Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers and saw firsthand how discarded materials were transformed into something monumental, even magical. “I’m a guy who never throws anything away,” Sal told me with a laugh. “When I was a kid, my mom would say, ‘You have to clean your room.’ “I just wanted to hide things. “
