Artist Alison Saar on why she gives power to the Black female body

One of the most searing artistic experiences I’ve ever had came courtesy of Alison Saar in 2017. The Los Angeles artist was part of a group show of Black female sculptors titled “Signifying Form” at the Landing gallery in L.A.’s West Adams district, organized by independent curator jill moniz.

The show was memorable all around. But Saar’s piece, in particular, floored me. The nearly 7-foot-tall sculpture titled “Cake Walk,” from 1997, presented a larger-than-life marionette of a Black woman that the viewer can control via a system of pulleys. The title references a processional dance that originated on Southern plantations during the slavery era and would later be parodied by white performers in minstrel shows. In Saar’s piece, a firm tug on the pulleys could make the figure dance.

A detail from Alison Saar’s 1997 sculpture “Cake Walk,” on view at the Landing in 2017.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

On the one hand, it’s an irresistible work. Saar invites the viewer to touch a work in a place where touch is usually forbidden. It’s also one that left me feeling queasy. To engage the marionette is to engage the manipulation of a vulnerable Black woman’s body (she is nude). It is also to engage a whole legacy of manipulation and control over Black women.

It’s a piece I haven’t stopped thinking about since — just like I haven’t stopped thinking about many of Saar’s other potent works: sculptures, drawings and paintings of Black female figures who may be vulnerable, yet are also intent on reclaiming their agency. In a 2018 solo show at her longtime gallery, L.A. Louver, the artist created a series of works inspired by the character of Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which took the stereotypical uncivilized wild child from the book and transformed her into a potent symbol of Black female force.

There is a lot more where that came from. And some of it is on view in an ongoing two-part survey, “Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe,” at the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena and the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College. Sadly, “Cake Walk” is not on display, reflecting the need for a comprehensive retrospective devoted to this important artist. But the shows nonetheless offer a broad overview of Saar’s work, which, in deft and profound ways, has engaged myth, spirituality, history and the physical and psychological states of women.

Saar, 65, who is mixed race, hails from artistic lineage. Her mother is Betye Saar, an icon of the Black Arts Movement, and her father, Richard Saar, who died in 2004, was a ceramicist and conservator. Now that her two children with husband Tom Leeser (also an artist) are grown, Alison says she has found her art evolving.

“The work started becoming more political,” she says over a cup of tea in her Laurel Canyon home. “The work was always political, but with Black Lives Matter, more so.”

This month, Saar added an outdoor sculpture to her show at the Armory: “Catfish Dreamin’,” which resuscitates an early public work that she first staged in Baltimore in 1993. The installation is accompanied by an online component, which features digital works by her and other artists that draw from watery themes. In addition, Saar has been busy organizing a group show, “SeenUNseen,” which will land at L.A. Louver in November and focus on artists, she says, who serve as “mediums with the spirit world.” All of this is in addition to the public commission she is working on for Destination Crenshaw, a monument to the culture of the neighborhood.

In this conversation, which has been condensed for space and clarity, Saar talks about how being a mother has been formative to her art, why touch is vital and what sorts of magic she thinks we could all use right now.

Alison Saar’s dog Crumb makes an impromptu appearance in a portrait session with the artist.

(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)