Betye Saar, Artist of Black Liberation, Dies at 99

Betye Saar, the Los Angeles artist whose assemblages reflected Black identity, culture and spirituality, died Sunday morning in Los Angeles at 99. Her death was confirmed Monday by relatives. She would have turned 100 this week.

A central figure of the 1960s Black Art Movement, Saar pioneered assemblage boxes — sculptures built from found objects — and reclaimed Jim Crow-era memorabilia as totems of Black liberation.

"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," said Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her. "Her appropriation of Black collectibles, heirlooms, and utilitarian objects are transformed through subversion," the gallery said. "Among the older generation of Black American artists, Saar is without reproach."

Saar began her career in design and turned to art at 35. She grew up in Pasadena, was part of a community of Black artists in nearby Altadena and often cited Simon Rodia's Watts Towers as an early inspiration. She continued making art into her 90s.

Her practice spanned painting, printmaking and sculpture, incorporating dolls, washboards and other antiques. Boats, clocks, cages and altars recur in her work, as do symbols of the occult and cosmology, and lions referencing her astrological sign, Leo.

"Black Girl's Window," made in 1969, was groundbreaking but was not widely celebrated until decades later. The Museum of Modern Art in New York acquired it in 2019. "There weren't that many galleries in Los Angeles at the time and there certainly weren't any for Black artists," she once said in an interview.

"The Liberation of Aunt Jemima," created in 1972, is among her most important works. It uses memorabilia she collected that denigrated Black people, including a "mammy," the 19th century minstrel character who smiled while serving white slave owners. In Saar's hands, the figure still smiles — but holds a rifle and a hand grenade. It came in response to the 1968 assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis, Tennessee. King's death "triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior," Saar said.

"I had a lot of hesitation about using powerful, negative images such as these," she said. "What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure." Quaker Oats announced in 2020 that it would retire the Aunt Jemima brand after more than 130 years, acknowledging the logo and its origins were "based on a racial stereotype."

Saar taught and mentored generations of Black artists, including painter Kerry James Marshall. Her work appeared in a 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, but large institutions exhibited it only sporadically for decades afterward. In 2019, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and MoMA mounted concurrent solo shows. In spring 2026, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

"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," said Angela Robinson Witherspoon, who produced and directed the 2023 documentary "Betye Saar: Ready to Be A Warrior," which features interviews with John Legend, Tina Knowles and others. "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" is on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles, and more than 100 of her dolls are on view at the New-York Historical Society in Manhattan.