Conjure woman: Betye Saar and rituals of transformation, 1960--1990.

Abstract

California assemblage artist Betye Saar has been called a conjure woman of the arts, masterfully combining found objects and transforming them into powerful visual statements. However, Saar's carefully planned career, launched in the politically charged environment of Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, was not the product of magic, but rather the result of Saar's determination to carve out personal and social power through art. This artistic biography, the most substantial study of Saar's career to date, charts the transformation of her artwork during a period of rapid social transformation. By outlining Saar's strategies of transformation---from the artistic margins, through the intersecting art communities of Southern California, to the international mainstream---this project asserts Saar's professional agency, details a modern history of black arts in California, and provides a synoptic study of California arts during the age of protest. Ultimately, Saar emerges as a case study of an artist at the forefront of California's black art and women's art movements; a multipositional artist who wove in and out of communities to produce work that challenged essentialized notions of modern, black, feminine and politically engaged art. Betye Saar culled imagery and objects from the political movements, spiritual systems, and visual cultures around her, from black aesthetics, feminist art, African art, and Latino art, to modern art, popular culture, and personal memorabilia. The synthetic artwork that resulted reflected her critical interpretations of these genres and her own interactive and fluid construction of identity. Though previous scholarship has served to mystify Saar by overwhelmingly emphasizing the spiritual and ritualistic aspects of her work, this dissertation will historicize her career and artwork by taking into account the complex matrix of social, cultural, regional and historical contexts from which they emerged. In so doing, it denies the existence of a single black aesthetic and asserts that black art during the sixties, seventies and eighties was not a monolith, but a range of expressions and experiences. Covering the years from 1960--1990, my thesis is that Saar used two primary strategies in her art making: ritual and multipositionality. Drawing upon the notions of ritual as articulated by Nestor Garcia Canclini, redemptive assemblage as expressed by Richard Candida Smith, and multipositionality as defined by Earl Lewis, I will explain Saar's art making as her ritual of transformation. I define her ritual as a multifaceted change process that transformed common objects into art and de-essentialized black art and identity into a range of lived experiences. As a result of the accumulated nature of both her artwork and identity, I argue for readings of Saar's work that are multipositional, demonstrating that explorations of identity in visual culture must look beyond objects to the complex web of social contexts in which they are produced.