Meet Alison Saar

Read About the Artist Alison Saar

Alison Saar was born in 1956, in Los Angeles, California, into a family of artists. She was exposed to art and the process of making art from a young age. Early on, Saar was inspired by found art and the idea that you can make art out of anything. Her mother, Betye, was an assemblage artist who sometimes worked in the kitchen and often invited her children to experiment with her art materials. Saar’s father, Richard, was an artist and art conservator, and Saar helped him restore and clean paintings. When Saar was six years old, her family moved to Laurel Canyon, a vibrant artist community in 1960s Los Angeles. Her neighbors and family friends were artists, writers, actors, and musicians, and she grew up attending art openings. It’s no wonder that Saar has said art was her first language!

Saar studied studio art and art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Art History in 1978. There, she studied with the influential art historian Samella Lewis, whose teaching about African diasporic art left a lasting impression on Saar’s practice. In 1981, she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles.

As a young artist, Saar was an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, in 1983. During this time, Saar immersed herself in the historic African American neighborhood’s rich history and began incorporating found objects collected throughout the city into her work. Her experience there influenced her artistic practice for years to come, inspiring artworks that honor, celebrate, and preserve Harlem’s rich legacy and history.

Saar makes sculptures, prints, mixed-media artworks, and installations. Throughout her career, she has embraced her childhood discovery that art does not require expensive or precious materials—it can be made with almost anything. She often scavenges streets, flea markets, yard sales, and estate sales for objects whose histories become integral to her work, transforming everyday materials into powerful artistic expressions of memory and identity.

Grounded in the experiences of Black womanhood, Saar often tells stories about ancestry, mythology, spirituality, African diasporic cultures, motherhood, family, race, and feminism through her art. Drawing inspiration from artists such as her mother, she centers the lives, histories, resilience, and counter-narratives of Black women while exploring broader questions of memory, identity, and cultural inheritance.

Questions

Write or discuss your responses.

• Saar describes art as her “first language.” What do you think Saar means by this? What is something that feels like your “first language?”
• How is Alison Saar’s artwork influenced and inspired by her identity and family history in ways that challenge dominant narratives? Cite examples from the text.
• Are there ways your family or identity inspires or influences you?

An artwork made by combining various materials, often including everyday or found objects, into a new artwork. Unlike a collage, assemblages are usually three-dimensional, like a sculpture.

A professional responsible for preserving old or damaged objects and materials.

A story, perspective, or account that challenges and offers an alternative to a dominant, mainstream, or “master” narrative.

Cultures and groups of people who are settled far away from their ancestral homelands.

Refers to the stories or perspectives that are most widely accepted and repeated in a society, often reflecting the views of those with the most power or influence, while other perspectives may be ignored or marginalized.

Artwork created by taking ordinary, pre-existing objects and presenting or combining them in a new way to give them artistic meaning.

The qualities, expressions, beliefs, physical traits, cultures, and social statuses that comprise a person and/or group of people.

A large scale, 3-D artwork that usually takes up a whole space, room, or environment.