Tomorrow is the Problem: A Podcast by Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami · ICA Miami

10: Rituals of Transformation: Betye Saar and Black Feminist Art

·34 min·3 clips

Betye Saar's 'Liberation of Aunt Jemima' turns a racist mammy doll into a figure holding a gun and broom.

The episode begins carefully, with a warning before descriptions of the transatlantic slave trade. Then it moves to summertime Watts in the 1930s. Simon Rodia is building upward, turning scrap material, patient labor, and discarded things into something close to reverence. Betty is still a child. Walking with her grandmother, she sees found objects become charged by placement, attention, and ritual. That lesson stays. Nearly 60 years later, her poem for Ritual and Remembrance reaches for roots, ceremonies, and histories that can be felt even when they cannot be fully recovered. The episode treats Saar's art as an encounter, not a lesson pinned to the wall. Her practice moves through four stages: imprint, search, recycling and transformation, and release. Imprint gathers the private material: ideas, memories, dreams, and the residue of experience before any object joins the assemblage. Search gives the work its matter. Saar finds objects in flea markets or nature, then shifts them with painting, glue, and arrangement. Transformation is not a polish job. A discarded object enters a new setting, carrying its history without getting trapped in its first use. Release happens when the audience receives the work. An installation is not quite finished until people walk into it and bring their own memories along. Wings of Mourning makes that plain. Viewers leave offerings for the dead, and the altar gathers buttons, pearls, cards, and private tokens. The audience becomes part of the piece. What starts in Saar's studio continues in public, where race, gender, and spiritual imagination meet. By the end, portal is the right word: a passage where past and present touch, and another world gets briefly rehearsed.

As heard by us

A measured look at Betye Saar's art as ritual, memory, and found objects.

Betye Saar's work is presented as ritual made visible, beginning with the Watts Towers and a young Betty Saar learning how discarded objects can be lifted into reverence.

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Why you'd press play

You want Betye Saar read through ritual, memory, and found objects.

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