Alison Saar has been making artwork her entire life. “I say it was kind of like my first language,” she tells Hyperallergic. Raised by artists Richard and Betye Saar, she and her sisters “were always making and drawing things, probably even before we were speaking much …. There was really no getting away from it.”
Introduced up in Laurel Canyon, an enclave in Los Angeles, California, she and sisters Lezley and Tracye have been at all times inspired to experiment and create with abandon, “no matter how funky or weird it was,” which fortified their burgeoning inventive passions. “We always felt that we could just make whatever we wanted to and everything was good and worthwhile and had value,” Saar displays. “There was no such thing as a bad painting or drawing. I think that was an incredible gift from both my parents, and gave us a lot of freedom to just develop into the artists that we are.”
This Saturday, September 20, Saar can be celebrated for this lifetime of artmaking — a apply characterised by a singular, folk-influenced fashion primarily depicting Black ladies and women — on the David C. Driskell Gala at Atlanta’s Excessive Museum of Artwork. She is the twentieth recipient of the Driskell Prize, an unrestricted $50,000 award devoted to artists and students furthering the lineage of African American artwork. Judges for this 12 months’s honor are artwork historian and professor Kellie Jones, its inaugural recipient; artist and 2006 Driskell Prize honoree Willie Cole; and Excessive Museum curators Kevin W. Tucker and Maria L. Kelly.
Alison Saar, “Salon” (2024), solid bronze and stone (© Alison Saar; picture by Fred Mauviel, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
“I think what’s so amazing about the Driskell Prize is that it alternates between scholars and artists. It’s so essential that we cannot succeed without the help of the other, and to really understand that we need to uplift both scholars and artists in order to survive and be seen out there,” Saar remarked in an interview with Hyperallergic forward of the gala. “It’s just really an amazing gift to the Black arts community on both levels.”
Saar remembers studying of David C. Driskell, the artist and historian for whom the prize is called, as an undergraduate at Scripps School from her mentor and professor, Samella Lewis. Driskell curated the momentous 1976 exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Artwork on the Los Angeles County Museum of Artwork, which Saar says was a strong introduction to his scholarship. Over time, Saar and Driskell would come to know one another via mutual mates and creative connections, each serving on the board of the Skowhegan Faculty of Portray & Sculpture.
“Having known David and really admired him for all these years, it was just really lovely to have my name amongst the list of all the amazing artists and scholars that have been granted this honor,” Saar says. Earlier recipients embody Naomi Beckwith in 2024, Amy Sherald in 2018, and Xaviera Simmons in 2008.
Saar herself has turn into an integral a part of the Black artwork canon. Her work is notable for its materials experimentation and scholarly basis, in addition to its reverence for African diasporic histories, motherhood, and spiritualities. She typically portrays chattel slavery, incorporating money crops like sugarcane, cotton, rice, indigo, and tobacco, and providing speculative depictions of revolt and empowerment.
Element of Alison Saar, “Queen of the Boneyard” (2025), wooden, ceiling tin, wire, dominoes (© Alison Saar; picture by Matt Emonson, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
Saar crafts with a wealth of supplies throughout mediums: drawings in charcoal and chalk, work in watercolor and acrylic, and sculptures typically assembled from discovered objects or carved into sturdy wooden. In Saar’s figures, hammered metals turn into stunning darkish pores and skin, peppered with nails, and wires kind the crown of an afro or sprout like cascading hair. The classic patterns of ceiling tin adorn their sculpted attire, and so they brandish vintage, burnished farming tools.
“I became really interested in looking at a revolution and sort of revolting against our circumstances by using the only weapons we had, which were our tools,” Saar explains. “And this idea that you kind of turn scythes and sickles and hoes and machetes into weapons for freedom.”
She says this curiosity in her ancestral historical past comes from being nurtured by sturdy ladies concerned within the Civil Rights Motion, particularly her mom and grandmother. “I was raised on really studying and respecting our history and always wanting to further push that line in terms of equity and justice for African Americans and people of color in the United States,” Saar explains.
Alison Saar at Arion Press, San Francisco, California (2024) (picture by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
She remembers her grandmother as an activist concerned within the Pasadena chapter of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Individuals (NAACP), and {that a} copy of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Motion: Documentary of a Wrestle for Equality (1964) sat on her espresso desk. Her mom, Betye Saar, is a celebrated artist of the Black Arts Motion, famend for her assemblage and printmaking. The mother-daughter pair have collaborated on works like “House of Gris Gris” (1989) and exhibited alongside each other within the touring exhibition Household Legacies: The Artwork of Betye, Lezley, and Alison Saar.
Meditating on their affect, Saar expresses that she was “surrounded by really strong Black women and always in awe at their abilities to raise families and to nourish them and to work — they all were workers — and then at the same time, to just bring beauty into the world as artists or as craftpersons.”
Later, Saar’s personal journey into motherhood would turn into a consequential power on her artmaking. The start of her first youngster catalyzed a particular need to focus her portrayals totally on ladies and women. “It just seems like magic that women can usher these new souls and spirits into the world,” she muses.
Alison Saar, “Feral Son” (c. 1980), blended media (© Alison Saar; courtesy Excessive Museum of Artwork)
Her creative profession grew to become interconnected with these milestones of parenthood, and her daughter would later turn into the mannequin for a few of her artworks, like “Mirror Mirror (Mulata Seeking Inner Negress)” (2006) and “Rise Sally Rise” (2003). “My whole career has always been kind of marked on this calendar of my children and their development and where we were,” she displays.
Her return to the Excessive Museum to obtain the Driskell Prize at Saturday’s gala marks a return to a wealthy second in her historical past as an artist. Her first journey to the Atlanta establishment was for her 1993 exhibition Fertile Floor — considered one of her first exhibitions, which additionally coincided together with her being pregnant and the start of her daughter, she recollects. She recounts “getting off the plane and just being hit with that humidity and the smell of the dirt and the smell of the Georgia Pine. And when you’re flying over and you see that red clay … the fertility of that space, just, really — it was really overpowering for me.”
Whereas Fertile Floor was considered one of Saar’s earliest solo exhibits, her work has since been displayed at museums and galleries just like the Whitney Museum of American Artwork and the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum, together with her largest retrospective thus far, Of Aether and Earthe, happening from 2020 to 2021 on the Benton Museum of Artwork at Pomona School and the Armory Middle for the Arts in Pasadena. Her first European exhibition went up this previous summer time at Galerie Lelong in Paris, the identical metropolis the place she was commissioned to create a everlasting public monument for its 2024 Olympic Video games. Her most up-to-date public artwork fee, introduced final week, is for the Obama Presidential Middle in Chicago.
Set up of Alison Saar: Candy Life at Galerie Lelong, Paris, France (©Alison Saar; picture by Fabrice Gibert, courtesy Galerie Lelong, Paris, France)
With these accolades beneath her belt, Saar is trying towards the long run. She shares that she is settling into a brand new studio and is happy in regards to the prospect of unencumbered creation — the identical freedom she loved when she first started making artwork. Throughout the transfer, she’s unearthed misplaced, decades-old supplies, able to be reincorporated into her apply.
“I’m really excited to pull those things out and see if they inspire anything, inspire any directions, and just to get busy and play without any sort of preset ideas or without any deadlines or without any obligations,” she says. To her, this clean slate is “frightening on one hand, but it’s also really liberating …. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to explore again.”
