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In Betye Saar's work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades. "I can no longer separate the work by saying this deals with the occult and this deals with shamanism or this deals with so and so.... It's all together and it's just my work," she said in 1989.

Saar grew up in Los Angeles and Pasadena, California, and studied design at the University of California, Los Angeles-a career path frequently foisted upon women of color who were interested in the arts, due to the racism and sexism prevalent in universities at the time. Saar eventually studied printmaking, and her earliest works are on paper. Using the soft-ground etching technique, she pressed stamps, stencils, and found materials into her plates to capture their images and textures. Her prints are notably concerned with spirituality, cosmology, and family, as in Anticipation (1961) and Lo, The Mystique City (1965).

Saar's visit to an exhibition of work by Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 profoundly influenced her own artmaking. Cornell's practice of collecting and arranging found objects into assemblage boxes inspired her to do the same. She began by inserting her own prints and drawings into window frames, as with Black Girl's Window, an iconic autobiographical work that also signaled a new interest in addressing race and contemporary events in her art.

After the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., her mystical assemblages became increasingly radical. Saar has since repurposed washboards, jewelry boxes, and racist ephemera as a way of reclaiming images and artistic power. For her best-known work, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972), Saar arms a Mammy caricature with a rifle and a hand grenade, rendering her as a warrior against not only the physical violence imposed on black Americans, but also the violence of derogatory stereotypes and imagery.

The artist has also repeatedly turned to her family and their history as sources for her work. "Keep for Old Memiors" (1976) includes fragments of letters and photographs saved by the artist's great aunt Hattie, framed by a pair of women's gloves that suggest, among other things, the tactility of accessing a physical record of one's life. The intimacy and scale of Saar's work encourages a personal connection to the artist and her experience. "To me the trick is to seduce the viewer. If you can get the viewer to look at a work of art, then you might be able to give them some sort of message." Over the course of her now six-decade career, Saar has continued to make work that honors or critiques the familiar and mines the unknown. "It may not be possible to convey to someone else the mysterious transforming gifts by which dreams, memory, and experience become art. But I like to think that I can try."

Introduction by Esther Adler, Associate Curator, Department of Drawings and Prints, and Nectar Knuckles, Curatorial Fellow, 2019

The research for this text was supported by a generous grant from The Modern Women's Fund.

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American, born 1926. In Betye Saar's work, time is cyclical. History and experiences, emotion and knowledge travel across time and back again, linking the artist and viewers of her work with generations of people who came before them. This is made explicit in her commitment to certain themes, imagery, and objects, and her continual reinvention of them over decades.

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Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work conflating gender, race, art history, and personal identity. Creating complex collages, videos, sculptures, and performances, Mutu's work features recurring mysterious leitmotifs such as masked women and snake-like tendrils. Her pastiche-like practice combines a variety of source material and textures to explore consumerism and excess: for a 2005 work titled Cancer of the Uterus, Mutu employed a medical pathology diagram, facial features cut from a magazine, fur, and a heavy application of black glitter to create an eerily distorted face. The almost science fiction-like nature of her imagery has placed her work within the realm of Afrofuturism, and her practice is often discussed as providing an alternate course of history for people of African descent. Deeply concerned with Western commercialism, Mutu has explained that "a lot of my work reflects the incredible influence that America has had on contemporary African culture. Some of it's insidious, some of it's innocuous, some of it's invisible. It's there." Born on June 22, 1972 in Nairobi, Kenya, she received her BFA from Cooper Union in 1996, and subsequently her MFA in sculpture from Yale University in 2000. Her work has been exhibited worldwide, including a major retrospective that opened in the Nasher Museum of Art in North Carolina in 2013, and traveled globally. In 2019, her exhibition The NewOnes, will free Us, was featured as the inaugural Facade Commission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It consisted of four bronze sculptures, individually titled The Seated I, II, III, and IV, that sat in each niche on the front of the museum which had previously remained empty for 117 years.The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

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Wangechi Mutu is a contemporary Kenyan artist noted for her work conflating gender, race, art history, and personal identity. View Wangechi Mutu's 203 artworks on artnet. Find an in-depth biography, exhibitions, original artworks for sale, the latest news, and sold auction prices.

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The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe New Mexico.

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Working with the camera, Weems sets out to capture the beauty of the everyday through both candid and elegantly staged photographs. "I'm always questioning what has been left in and what has been left out," she explains. "How do we . . . insert for the first time a body that has not often been there or . . . pull forward a body that rests in the background."

Born in Portland, Oregon, in 1953, Weems received her first camera as a 20th birthday gift and immediately fell in love with it. She studied photography and design at the City College of San Francisco, received a bachelor of fine arts from the California Institute of the Arts and a master of fine arts in photography from the University of California, San Diego, and enrolled in a graduate program in folklore at the University of California, Berkeley.

In Family Pictures and Stories, Weems used documentary-style images to memorialize her loving, multigenerational family. Some of the pictures brim with energy while others exude moments of quiet.

But it was in 1990, while teaching photography in a small college town in Massachusetts, that Weems began her now renowned Kitchen Table Series.

Weems's Kitchen

Shot in her own kitchen, the 20 carefully staged photographs center Weems as she sits, alone and with others, at her table. Each figure plays a role in a domestic tale that unfolds throughout the series. And among the photographs are text panels that add a layer to the narrative.

The series begins as a love story: a woman looks directly at the camera, applying her make-up while a man hovers over her shoulder. They go on to embrace tenderly over a meal or knowingly smile at one another as they play card games and smoke.

Soon, a distance emerges between the pair. He, fixated on his newspaper, no longer seems to notice the woman. Hard conversations take place between friends under the tense glow from the light above.

In the final image of the series, we see the woman on her own, asserting herself at the head of the table, in command of her actions and of the card game in front of her.

Weems placed herself at the center of the series for a simple reason: "I was the only person around." She carved time out of odd hours in her schedule to ensure that the work was completed. Weems worked on the series day in and day out for months and, right at the end, added the textual commentary.

Everyday Experiences of Black Women

This landmark series looks at the role of women in the domestic sphere, showing the significance of their many, multifaceted relationships. It catches tensions and intimacies that feel universal, and are united, so simply, by one piece of furniture: the kitchen table.

My favorite image is of a woman and her daughter, who sit at the table applying make-up and lipstick, as if mimicking one another. I find that photography so rarely captures such intimate and private moments in the mother-daughter relationship.

The series broke ground as one of the earliest representations of the everyday experiences of Black women-images that the art world (and the world at large) so often dismisses. "I knew that I was making images unlike anything I had seen before, but I didn't know what that would mean. I knew what it meant for me, but I didn't know what it would mean historically, within the terms of a graphic history," Weems said.

The series has inspired many artists. Mickalene Thomas first saw it in Portland 1994. "That was the moment I knew I wanted to become an artist," she said.

The work has taken on a life of its own. Weems has said that "Kitchen Table doesn't really belong to me anymore. I was the conduit for it. But it actually belongs to those people who engage in it. . . It's much bigger than I am."

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Carrie Mae Weems on the Everyday Experiences of Black Women at the Kitchen Table

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Author and art historian Katy Hessel explores the photographer's renowned series.

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Self Portrait Along the Boarder Line Between Mexico and the United States

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Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden | Smithsonian

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Guided by her unique vision and unparalleled creativity, critically acclaimed artist Yayoi Kusama has been breaking new ground for more than six decades. In 1993, she became the first woman to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, and last year, Time magazine named her one of the world's most influential people.

Born in 1929, Kusama grew up near her family's plant nursery in Matsumoto, Japan. At nineteen, following World War II, she went to Kyoto to study the traditional Japanese style of painting known as Nihonga. During this time, she began experimenting with abstraction, but it was not until she arrived in the United States, in 1957, that her career took off. Living in New York from 1958 to 1973, Kusama moved in avant-garde circles with such figures as Andy Warhol and Allan Kaprow while honing her signature dot and net motifs, developing soft sculpture, creating installation-based works, and staging Happenings (performance-based events). She first used mirrors as a multireflective device in Infinity Mirror Room-Phalli's Field, 1965, transforming the intense repetition that marked some of her earlier works into an immersive experience. Kusama returned to Japan in 1973 but has continued to develop her mirrored installations, and over the years, she has attained cult status, not only as an artist, but as a novelist.

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Yayoi Kusama: Infinity Mirrors | Hirshhorn Museum | Smithsonian

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Guided by her unique vision and unparalleled creativity, critically acclaimed artist Yayoi Kusama has been breaking new ground for more than six decades. In 1993, she became the first woman to represent Japan at the Venice Biennale, and last year, Time magazine named her one of the world's most influential people.

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Amy Sherald - Hauser & Wirth https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/11577-amy-sherald/

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For reproduction of works by Helen Frankenthaler,
contact Artists Rights Society (ARS, NY)

Please be advised that Helen Frankenthaler Foundation
does not authenticate or attribute works of art.

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Paintings - Artworks - Helen Frankenthaler Foundation

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The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, established and endowed by the artist during her lifetime (1928-2011), is dedicated to promoting greater public interest in and understanding of the visual arts.

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I Go To Prepare a Place For You, 2021
National Museum of African American History and Culture

Don't Tread on Me, God Damn, Let's Go! - The Harlem Hellfighters, 2022 Smithsonian American Art Museum

I Am Not Your Negro, 2019
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

The Family, 2017
Columbus Museum of Art

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I Go To Prepare a Place For You, 2021 National Museum of African American History and Culture Don't Tread on Me, God Damn, Let's Go!