Alison Saar
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Alison Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1956 to celebrated African American artist Betye Saar and painter-conservator Richard Saar. She received her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design in 1981. Her work has been exhibited internationally with key exhibitions at the UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, L.A. Louver Gallery, and Pasadena Museum of California Art and was an artist in residence at Dartmouth College.
Her sculptures and installations explore themes of African cultural diaspora and spirituality, and her studies of Latin American, Caribbean and African art and religion have also informed her work. Saar’s fascination with vernacular folk art and ability to build an oasis of beauty from cast-off objects are evident in her sculptures and paintings. Saar’s highly personal, often life-sized sculptures are marked by their emotional candor, and by contrasting materials and messages that imbue her work with a high degree of cultural subtext.
Art critic Rebecca Epstein writes, “Marrying soft with severe is the installation ‘Suckle’: 15 hanging cast bronze skillets if varying size, with an ample female breast emerging out of each pan bottom. Engaging the material via cooking, nurturing and sex, the piece is literal but also ironic and iconic, its inherent grace stopping it miles short of cliché.”
“Saar juggles themes of personal and cultural identity as she fashions various sizes of female bodies (often her own) that are buoyant with story while solid in stance. [Her works often embody a] balance of strength and tenderness, in form and idea.”
[edit] Awards
Saar is a recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Artist Fellowship.
