Betye Saar: Keepin' It Clean

Exhibition Website

May 28 2017 - Aug 20 2017

Craft Contemporary

Los Angeles, CA

This solo exhibition of seminal contemporary artist Betye Saar features the artist’s series of washboard assemblage sculptures—an ongoing body of work Saar started in the late 1990s. The washboard is a potent object for Saar, a reference she uses to examine the intersection of race, class, and labor. 

Saar has shaped the development of assemblage art in the United States, and the washboard pieces demonstrate Saar’s ongoing commitment to illuminate the social and political concerns of our time. To give deeper context to the washboard assemblages, two related tableaux and a selection of washboards from Saar’s personal collection are included in the exhibition.

Born in 1926, Saar is a significant figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s who has addressed racism, memory, and Black consciousness through complex assemblages that are at once confrontational, spiritual, and familial.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website

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  • Sculpture
  • American
  • Contemporary
  • Betye Saar

Exhibition Venues & Dates