Lezley Saar at the California African American Museum

Lezley Saar, Not born under a rhyming planet (2014). Acrylic on fabric, 24 x 18 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Taking its title from the 1863 Salon des Refusés, which featured artists rejected by the French Academy—including Courbet, Manet, Pissarro, and Whistler—Lezley Saar’s exhibition at CAAM focuses on those excluded from mainstream society, due to their race, gender, or fluid identities. Saar draws from Victoriana, assemblage art, and surrealism, creating hybrid objects that combine delicately painted portraits with photographic elements, often surrounded by found frames. She places her subjects in fantastical settings where their status as outsiders is welcomed as opposed to shunned.

Three bodies of work are included in the exhibition: Madwoman in the Attic/Madness and the Gaze (2004-2012), Gender Renaissance (2015-present), and Monad (2014). The first features women from 19th century literature who were deemed mad; the second focuses on gender fluid individuals, some pulled from history; and the last merges the macro and microverses, depicting figures in a unicellular world floating in a vast intergalactic space.

Saar renders her subjects with crystalline clarity, juxtaposing them with objects from the worlds of science, culture, or nature. Often painting on fabric rather than canvas, Saar lets the pattern of the textiles bleed through to her painted surface. Compelling when it depicts a delicate countenance, flowing garment, or seashell, her paint handling shines when portraying hair, which branches out from heads like jagged coral, while in others it billows like a wad of cotton.

Digitally printed eyes float about some of the canvases, an unnecessary diversion that breaks the spell of her visionary, painted worlds. Also distracting is an assemblage of antique furniture and objects in the center of the room that, instead of grounding the works in history, seems like an overwrought, stylistic gesture.

When the works succeed, they do so smashingly, as with Miss Pearly, The Transcontinental Mindreader (2017), a portrait of an ambiguously gendered albino whose shock of white hair can’t be contained by the work’s baroque frame. Adorned with a delicate lace frock, head turned slightly away from the viewer in a ¾ profile, Miss Pearly has the regal air of an Elizabethan monarch. In depicting outcasts with the same dignity historically reserved for the ruling class, Saar’s Salon shows that representation can have more bearing on acceptance than the other way round.

Lezley Saar: Salon des Refusés runs from October 25, 2017 to February 18th, 2018 at the California African American Museum (600 State Drive, Exposition Park, Los Angeles, California 90037).

Lezley Saar, The Salon des Refusés (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, Bemused Resignation (2014). Mixed media on canvas, 16 x 12 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, Brainville (2016). Acrylic on fabric in antique frame, 22 x 15 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, The Salon des Refusés (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, Celestial Bridge (2014). Acrylic on fabric, 20 x 16 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, Religious Melancholia (2012) (detail). Acrylic and digital photographs on fabric, 63 x 32 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Lezley Saar, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (2014). Mixed media on canvas, 16 x 20 inches. Image courtesy of the artist and the California African American Museum.

Matt Stromberg is a freelance arts writer based in Los Angeles. In addition to Carla, his work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Guardian, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, Teremoto, KCET Artbound, Artsy, frieze, and Daily Serving.

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