Betye Saar
Betye Saar
American, 1926–2026
Birth placeLos Angeles, California, United States
Death placeLos Angeles, California, United States
BiographyFrom Roberts Projects:Betye Saar
1926–2026
Roberts Projects is deeply saddened to share that Betye Saar passed away in her sleep in the early morning of Sunday, July 26 in Los Angeles, just four days before her 100th birthday.
A pioneering artist and a leading figure in the assemblage movement, Betye Saar will be remembered for a body of work that powerfully interrogated African American identity, spirituality and the intersections between diverse cultures. Emerging as a vital voice during the Black Arts Movement and second-wave feminism of the late 1960s and 1970s, Saar utilized found objects, family heirlooms and vintage ephemera to explore themes of race, gender and historical memory. Her practice transformed everyday items into groundbreaking artworks and installations, cementing her legacy as one of the most influential artists of our time.
Among Saar’s most iconic works is her 1972 assemblage, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, which places a stereotypical mammy figure holding a broom and a rifle, transforming a symbol of servitude into a warrior of Black liberation. Another foundational work, Black Girl’s Window (1969), utilizes an old window frame as a structural device to merge autobiographical elements with mysticism and racial identity.
Saar’s seven-decade career has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at museums around the world, and her work is represented in the collections of more than ninety institutions globally. Her extraordinary body of work has established her as a landmark figure in contemporary art, with a voice that will continue to inspire future generations.
Saar was immensely proud of her family; she is survived by her three daughters, Lezley Saar (Agust Agustsson), Alison Saar (Tom Leeser) and Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh (Francis Cavanaugh) and her grandchildren Kyle Leeser, Maddy Inez, Sola Saar, Gen Saar-Agustsson, Spencer Saar Cavanaugh, Megan Cavanaugh and her red footed tortoise Rojo.
Saar’s legacy has been entrusted to the Betye Saar Legacy Group. Established in 2025 by the artist and her studio in collaboration with Roberts Projects, the legacy group is a coalition of leading scholars and esteemed curators from global institutions, each hand-selected by Saar for their expertise in different areas of her multidisciplinary practice and stands as a testament to the enduring importance of her life and work for future generations.
There are many opportunities to celebrate and engage with Saar’s work during her centennial year: including notable exhibitions such as Betye Saar’s Black Dolls at the New York Historical Society, on view through October 4, 2026, Betye Saar: Drifting Toward Twilight at the Huntington Library on view through November 30, 2027 and Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, on view at Roberts Projects Los Angeles through August 22, 2026.
And from https://news.artnet.com/art-world/betye-saar-obituary-2791286?utm_source=braze&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=dnl-am&utm_date=20260728
Betye Saar, Who Turned Black Stereotypes Into Symbols of Resistance, Dies at 99
Over her seven-decade career, the artist transformed everyday objects into potent meditations on race, memory, and spirituality.
Vittoria Benzine, Jul 27, 2026
[Image] Betye Saar in her LA studio on Jan. 22, 2026. Photo by David Sprague, courtesy of Roberts Projects and Alma.
American artist Betye Saar, best known for her assemblages alchemizing race, magic, and memory, died peacefully in her sleep yesterday morning, four days shy of her 100th birthday.
“Her practice transformed everyday items into groundbreaking artworks and installations, cementing her legacy as one of the most influential artists of our time,” Roberts Projects, which represents the artist, said in a statement. Saar is survived by her three daughters Lezley, Alison, and Tracye, as well as her six grandchildren and pet tortoise.
Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1926. Her father died when she was aged five, from an infection that a segregated hospital refused to treat. Saar’s mother took her and her two siblings to briefly live with her paternal grandfather in Watts. The family then moved in with her mother’s aunt in Pasadena, on the other side of L.A. Saar still visited Watts, however. An innate artist and mystic, she was mesmerized by the creation of Italian artist Simon “Sam” Rodia’s maximalist Watts Towers.
[Image] Installation view: “Betye Saar: Serious Moonlight” at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Oct 28, 2021–Apr 17, 2022. Photo: Zachary Balber
In 1958, after a decade in social work, Saar studied design, at California State University, Long Beach; the University of Southern California; and California State University. A printmaking elective marked her entry into fine art. Straightaway, Saar’s etchings bore supernatural overtones. House of Tarot (1966), for instance—currently on view in the Morgan Library and Museum’s tarot show—features cards real and imagined.
Saar’s long inclination for collecting knick-knacks culminated in 1969 with her first assemblage, Black Girl’s Window. In this sweet yet unsettling scene, nine tiles above the girl that peers into the reflected velvety night present flashes of the artist’s own charged arcana, from her father’s death to her zodiac sign.
[Image] Betye Saar, Black Girl’s Window (1969) Photo courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.
Following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Saar’s work grew more political. In 1972, she responded to an open call for a show of art inspired by Black superheroes at the Rainbow Sign in Berkeley with her most famous piece, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima. This provocative assemblage centers on a pencil and notebook holder in the shape of the “mammy” character which pervaded American marketing. By sticking a rifle in the figurine’s hand and a politically potent collage atop her skirt, Saar transformed this former object of ridicule into a grinning menace against prejudice.
[Image] Betye Saar, Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972). Photo by Benjamin Blackwell, courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
“That was the first piece, at least in California, where a derogatory image was used to switch stereotypes,” Saar told the Guardian in 2021, when Aunt Jemima announced its long-overdue rebrand. “That became my theme—taking the negative and making it positive.” Activist Angela Davis famously said the work sparked the Black women’s movement.
Saar spent the next half-century pushing her work’s core principles with varied experiments. A 1970 trip alongside artist David Hammons to see the many African, Egyptian, and Oceanic relics in Chicago’s Field Museum inspired Saar to visit Nigeria, Senegal, Brazil, and Haiti, introducing her to ever-wider languages, conceptually and materially. Her great-aunt’s death in 1974 brought family heirlooms into her oeuvre, leading to beloved assemblages like Records for Hattie (1975).
[Image] Betye Saar, Mojotech (1987). Courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s Saar played with more monumental scales, crafting immersive installations like the occult-tinged House of Fortune (1988) and large assemblages such as her altarpiece Wings of Morning (1992). Saar was the subject of dozens of solo shows throughout her seven-decade career, at esteemed institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Fondazione Prada in Paris. On her centennial year, her work has been included numerous group exhibitions from Massachusetts to Miami.
Several of Saar’s shows remain on view, too, including one focused on her wearable art at L.A.’s Roberts Projects gallery that is up through August 22, and another devoted to her influence on today’s artists at the Palmer Museum of Art in State College, Pennsylvania, on view through September 13.
The stewardship of Saar’s work now falls to her year-old Betye Saar Legacy Group, established by the artist and her studio in partnership with Roberts Projects.
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