Interview with Betye Saar

That same day at MOCA, installed just beyond the static-filled screen showing her film, my gaze landed on Saar’s seminal work Gris-Gris Box (1972), a narrow, vertical wooden box roughly the length of a xylophone. It is outfitted with a female doll figurine adorned with beads and feathers, framed by celestial ephemera including a crescent moon and planet-shaped globes, and surrounded by symbols that have been established as amulets of Saar’s specific aesthetic lexicon: eyes, hands, hair, mirrors. This work is inspired by traditional West African gris-gris, versatile charm objects (often in the form of small, wearable pouches) that further developed as talismans used in Haitian Vodou (and Louisiana Voodoo) practices, designed to protect—or bring good fortune to—the owner. Saar’s pieces are often physically unimposing, yet filled with symbolic heft. Her juxtaposition of literal and conceptual scale creates a uniquely disorienting experience that causes the viewer to toggle between the present and the past, the interior and exterior, this world and another one.

On July 30, 2026, Betye Saar would have turned 100 years old. Inspired by this centennial milestone, I’ve been reflecting on the impact her work has had on my relationship to representations of Black womanhood, our shared hometown of Los Angeles, and my own fixations on mythology, magic, ritual, and intuition. Saar’s legacy as a folk artist—whose work imaginatively reuses and recontextualizes items traditionally coded as “Black” or “feminine” in order to challenge stereotypes surrounding race and domesticity—is singular. Even still, her acceptance into establishment institutions and mainstream conversations on contemporary art has been somewhat belated.

In many ways, we’ve caught up to Saar as dominant culture has grown increasingly more comfortable with alternative approaches to spiritual practice. Saar has long channeled an array of symbols, drawing from the visual vocabularies of various faith systems like astrology, African diasporic religions, and others. Saar often describes her assemblages as containing traces of the found objects’ anonymous once-owners—an energy that she imbues further with her own touch. She talks about her works with an unaffected freedom, making them seem like mixed-media gatherings of cosmically aligned happenstance, as if the things she collects simply arrange themselves into works of art. Magic comes to those who have faith in its possibility, and I have never doubted the conjuring abilities of Black women with something to say.

Betye Saar, Gris-Gris Box (1972). Mixed-media assemblage, 29 × 8.5 × 2.75 inches. © Betye Saar. Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Collection of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Photo: Brian Forrest.

Born in Los Angeles, Saar spent her early years in Watts before her family settled in Pasadena, where she would develop her artistic sensibility in earnest—first taking art classes at Pasadena City College before matriculating with a degree in design from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1949, where her parents met as students decades before. Known for her mixed-media assemblage works that range from political and mystical to feminist and funny, her pieces poke fun at the madness of logic and critique race and gender-based prejudice through her animation of quotidian and forgotten objects into sacredness.

The artist’s penchant for collecting ephemera began as a child: “If you’re an assemblage artist, you don’t throw away anything,” Saar quipped during a Tuesday afternoon press preview at Roberts Projects in May. “Even now, if I’m walking down the street and I find a piece of paper that’s really interesting…I still collect odd things and hope to recycle them into assemblage. Something has a little voice that says, ‘Oh, take me home!’”

Most known for her assemblage and printmaking work, Saar’s more obscured, earlier artistic work in the commercial and performance art worlds is the focus of Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar (May 30–August 22, 2026), on view at Roberts Projects. This show, which doubles as a centennial celebration, heavily features Saar’s costume design sketches and creations for theater productions (namely at L.A.’s Inner City Cultural Center). The exhibition also includes handmade objects (including decorative pennants) produced for her booth at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, which she started attending with her daughters in 1965, during the family’s early days living in Laurel Canyon (where the artist still resides).

“Growing up, especially girls, they like to wear costumes and dress up and pretend to be other things, so that just seemed natural to me,” Saar mused about her wearable pieces, often purchased from second-hand stores and reworked by the artist, having learned to sew from her mother who worked as a seamstress. “And then I found out if I present this in the right way, it can also be art.”

Let’s Get It On invites us into different aspects of Saar’s practice as a young emerging artist. For instance, a vitrine is arranged with whimsically illustrated greeting cards featuring handwritten phrases like “Sinner or Saint (young is one of the things you ain’t),” (spotlighting Saar’s humor, which often lands with a wink), and a cluster of small enamelware objects representing the decorative arts business Saar cofounded with jewelry designer Curtis Tann in 1951 called Brown and Tann (Brown is Saar’s maiden name). The exhibition also features jewelry Saar fashioned out of leather scraps (given to her by Alonzo Davis, cofounder of Leimert Park’s historic Brockman Gallery), and some of her commercial artwork from the 1960s and ’70s, including album artwork for jazz musician Bennie Maupin and book covers for poet and novelist Ishmael Reed.

This expression of her style through watercolor, collage, and illustration feels like an exciting departure from her better-known assemblage works. They offer another lens through which to view the evolution of her style, while also revealing the reality of a working artist: to make a living, often one must explore different avenues of creation (or pursue multiple streams of income) over the course of a career. “Anything that has to do with the arts is hard living,” Saar said. “I used to wonder: Why is it so hard to be an artist? [But] all the rest of the working people were jealous, because we could really do what we wanted to do. We could use our imaginations to do all sorts of things.”

As a folk artist and pivotal figure in L.A.’s Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, Saar has lived long enough to see her position in the art world shift from exclusion to embrace. She saw beyond the status quo and restraints of the industry she inherited and was brave enough to imagine new futures, fashioning a sanctuary out of her creative legacy that continues to be a guide.

Evan Nicole Brown: Your art practice started with design [and] drawing greeting cards before evolving into assemblage. What did it feel like to find your voice, and to finally land on the medium that felt most aligned with you?

Betye Saar: Things came together for me when I saw the work of Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Museum in 1967. He made these wonderful assemblages, essentially out of junk. They were beautiful and funny and fascinating. I thought, “Hey, I like old boxes and bits of metal. I collect stuff. I can do that, too.” I saw his work and realized that it was okay to make art out of anything.

ENB: How does mixed media assemblage invite viewers into your storytelling in a way that graphic design, illustration, or other mediums couldn’t quite achieve?

BS: I get most of my materials at swap meets and estate sales, and people give me old stuff. I’ve always felt that old objects hold a power—they’ve survived, and they have a sense of the previous owner, they have a spirit. When I combine objects into my assemblages, sometimes their powers combine into a new entity. But it is also more personal, as each viewer sees an object differently and might have a different interpretation of it. Its appeal is much more mysterious than graphic design.

ENB: Are there certain materials that tend to make you feel emotions like joy, confusion, sadness, curiosity? What are they and why do they inspire these emotions?

BS: My creative process begins with the materials. Usually it’s an interesting base, like a box or a table, and I think about what goes inside. Sometimes a particular object speaks to me, and I find someplace for it to go. I guess my materials have a theme, like using a lady’s glove or vanity mirror makes the work about women. The tall ship symbolizes slavery. Clocks are about aging and the passing of time. Cages are about freedom and constraint.

Everything belonged to somebody else before anyway, and it has that energy. And that energy on top of another energy. Am I creating another energy? Yes! I don’t know all those stories, but I have a feeling about them.

ENB: Speaking of your emotional landscape, it must be so exciting that your hundredth birthday is in July. What a blessing! You’re a Leo in the zodiac; you’re fierce, you have power, and I see that in your work.

BS: Yes, but I’m not thinking about that when I’m making the work. I know some artists do work like that, but I think that’s so silly—you lose the whole thing by forcing it, and by concentrating on something rather than doing it naturally.

ENB: How did you feel walking through the Roberts Projects show and seeing the range of work you’ve done across your life?

BS: That’s my lifestyle! I’m a mother, I’m no longer a wife, but I’m a daughter. I keep house, I make art, and draw pictures. I work in the garden, I like a variety of things to do in my life and always have.

ENB: Right, and the timeline installed in the exhibition shows how prolific you’ve been across several decades, cultural eras, and personal phases of your life. I was struck by some of the projects you were involved with in the ’60s and ’70s, during the Black Arts Movement in Los Angeles. What was the lifestyle and community for Black artists like here at that time?

BS: What does Blackness mean? It’s the color of your skin, it’s a social upbringing, it’s an attitude. It’s mostly about the attitude. But labels are silly. I grew up in a racially mixed family, not that that was the important thing, but we never really talked about race. I don’t think, until the Black revolution, people really talked about race. We just were.

ENB: Though some of your work is overtly Black and political, I also see how cultural mixing finds its way into your work; in your assemblage art you’re often bringing together objects you’ve found from different places and owners, representing different cultural histories and styles.

BS: Right, it’s about how you put it together. And it may say one thing to one person and another thing to somebody else.

ENB: How important is mythology to you—in terms of developing your own self-mythology as an artist, but also telling stories about Black culture and the world, more broadly?

BS: There’s a power in the past, whether it’s a tribal mask from Africa or an old vintage photograph. Someone once posed for that photo and held it and may have given it to someone they loved. The mask may have been used in some ritual to ward off the bad or welcome the good. It’s important to acknowledge the past because it influences the present and hopefully the future.

ENB: Have you noticed a shift in attitudes toward mysticism and spirituality compared to when you first started incorporating these images into your work, and making things like Gris-Gris Box?

BS: That’s a tricky question, because the mystical images in Gris-Gris Box (1972) have been used for centuries: the constellations, eyes, et cetera. But now with technology, I think there has been some dilution of the power of these images and their concepts. You can buy a celestial mug on Amazon instead of laying on the lawn at night and looking up into the sky.

ENB: That’s such a great point. How has the growing focus on technological advancement in society impacted your work—which incorporates so many antiques and objects from the past—over the years? Why have you decided to incorporate modern tech elements into some of your pieces at different points in your career, while still managing to tell stories of ancestral memory?

BS: Aside from occasionally using neon lighting, my work is decidedly low-tech. That said, I’m attracted to objects, and I’ve long been attracted to the beauty of computer parts, circuit boards, resistors, and such. Ever since creating my artwork Mojotech at MIT in 1987, I’ve been collecting computer parts. It even goes back further to a movie I love called The Gods Must be Crazy (1980), in that I’m often attracted to an object for its shape and form and color and not what it is intended to be used for.

Betye Saar in her Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles studio (1976). Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Richard Saar.

Betye Saar, Kingdom of the Spirits (1991). Mixed media assemblage. Image courtesy of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer.

ENB: I see. That comes through in the way you tell stories with your objects—through reinvention. To my eye, you are a visual griot, telling stories of your travels, sharing commentary on current events, and keeping sacred rituals alive through your approach to printmaking, assemblage, and other mediums. What role has text played in your practice? I know you often write and include poetry alongside your creations—how does that help further your creative mission, to combine words and images?

BS: I do like titles and how words flow and create an image or mood. I’m never at a loss for titles and never use “Untitled” with my artworks—well, maybe way back with some of my early prints. I have a little notebook that I write titles in and also a large envelope, because sometimes an idea comes to me in the early morning and I write it on a scrap of paper and put it in the envelope. Sometimes the title comes first, and I create the artwork later. Sometimes I look through the notebook to help a work find its title. In my installation works, I usually have a line of poetry on the wall that helps explain what the piece is trying to convey, but I still prefer the viewer to interpret my work for themselves.

ENB: The way you give agency to the viewer to draw their own meaning from your work feels central to your practice, as does experiencing everyday wonder—like seeing beauty in things that have been forgotten, and witnessing magic in the mundane. Two places I’ve always considered non-traditional altars, in the sense that they feel energetically powerful, are my maternal grandmother’s bedroom vanity and my paternal grandmother’s rose garden. Do you have an altar? What does it look or feel like?

BS: I think my family would laugh and say that my whole house is an altar that is made up of mini altars. I’m a collector, and I like to see my things. I have collections of mercury glass objects, “Tramp art,” urns, blue things, red things. I like altars and their symmetry, so I tend to display my objects as such.

ENB: How would you describe your own personal oasis? What are the things you have there with you?

BS: My house is my oasis. I have my gardens and my tortoise. I have big windows to see out to the hills of my canyon, to see nature. I have my studios full of things to make art. I have everything I need.

This interview has been compiled from two conversations the writer had with Saar in 2024 and 2026.

Correction: An earlier version of this interview incorrectly stated that Betye Saar (1926-2026) celebrated her 100th birthday on July 30th. Saar passed away on July 26th at the age of 99. Carla dedicates this issue to her memory and the profound impact she made on L.A. art and culture.