This news text explores the life and work of Betye Saar, a legendary Angeleno assemblage artist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement. The text highlights her formative years, her creative process, and her impact on the art world, as well as her lifelong love for nature and her connection to the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena.
It's a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I'm walking side by side with Betye Saar , the legendary Angeleno assemblage art ist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement.
She's wearing a tonal gray sweater and coordinating pants with flashes of pale blue cheetah print on her shirt and scarf, her silver hair twisted into a soft topknot, her fingers stacked with flea-market jewelry collected over decades. We're joined by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.
A revelatory exhibition opening May 30 honors Saar's 100th birthday this summer, gathering more than 200 objects to explore a lesser-known but deeply formative period of her life. The show reframes those works not as a side note to Saar's assemblages but as the creative wellspring from which much of her larger practice emerged. Other celebrations of Saar's centennial this year include 'Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,' running from May 30 through August 22, 2026.
During the years the exhibition spans—the 1950s through the 1970s—Saar was raising her three daughters Lezley, Alison, and Tracye in Laurel Canyon while designing costumes for productions at Los Angeles's groundbreaking Inner City Cultural Center. At the same time, she was teaching, making greeting cards and enamel objects for extra income, and sewing clothing for friends and family.
Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar was only five years old when her father died, prompting her mother to move the family into her paternal grandmother's home in Watts. On walks through the neighborhood, Saar regularly passed Simon Rodia's, seeing firsthand how discarded materials could be transformed into something monumental, even magical.
The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in Pasadena was another important space for the artist, who still remembers visiting with her mother and aunt when she was as young as 12 and marveling at the plants and strange natural landscapes. Decades later, in 2023, Saar would return to the Huntington for one of her major institutional commissions, an immersive installation featuring a 17-foot vintage wooden canoe filled with found objects.
Even in death, those things can be really beautiful, she explained. In history, the magic took place in gardens, and witches grew certain plants that cast spells to cure something or to harm something. In 1944, Saar enrolled at Pasadena City College before transferring to UCLA two years later, graduating in 1949 with a degree in design and a minor in sociology. Schools remained segregated, and the possibility of becoming a professional artist was still largely unimaginable for Black women
Betye Saar West Coast Black Arts Movement Assemblage Art Inner City Cultural Center Laurel Canyon Simon Rodia Huntington Library Nature Gardens Witches Crafts Segregation Design Sociology UCLA Pasadena City College
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