Women Who Wander

A Buddhist chant in an Indonesian temple. A bustling Moroccan marketplace. A Haitian Vodou ceremony.

In the 1970s, cultural encounters like these launched artist Betye Saar into a nearly six-decade love affair with travel. Now 96 years old, Saar has visited more than 31 countries, documenting her experiences along the way in vividly colored travel sketchbooks combining hand-drawn observations with knickknacks, ephemera, and found items collected from her destinations.

It took until 2019 for a small selection of these sketchbooks—which Saar has long considered more personal documentation than art—to be displayed. They were featured in Betye Saar: Call and Response at LACMA and revealed for the first time to the public the depth of Saar’s creative process and the breadth of her inspiration. Now the full range of her sketchbooks is receiving attention in Betye Saar: Heart of a Wanderer, on view through May 21 at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.

“I love stepping off a plane and not understanding the language being spoken or why people are dressed a certain way,” says Saar. “Right away you’re on an adventure.”

In Heart of a Wanderer, these adventures are captured in 26 sketchbooks representing Saar’s sojourns to Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Covered with bold, saturated watercolors alongside gleaned materials such as dried flowers, currency, and stamps, the books capture the emotion and excitement of venturing abroad. The exhibition is supported in part by the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project initiative—designed to elevate and celebrate works on paper—and will entice visitors to reflect on their own travel experiences and dive deeper into Saar’s creativity.

“Betye always tries to transport you, to make you feel like you’re seeing something different and outside of everyday life,” says Diana Greenwald, William and Lia Poorvu Curator of the Collection at the Gardner and show organizer. “Because the sketchbooks have been closed for decades, except for Betye rifling through them, they’re incredibly vibrant. They make you yearn for far-off places.”

Although she would become a cosmopolitan, Saar’s early decades focused on Los Angeles. Born in the city in 1926, Saar went on to study design at UCLA and education and printmaking at Cal State Long Beach. She called herself an artist by age 35, first focusing her talents on prints and then transitioning to assemblage (the mixing and matching of objects) to create sculptures with mystical, religious, and familial themes. In the 1970s she chose to engage with topics of sexism and racism in American culture, a key example being The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972)—a box-shaped assemblage of a gun-toting Aunt Jemima that reclaimed the syrup-brand character as a symbol of Black empowerment. A breakthrough for Saar, the artwork established her as a leader of the Black Arts Movement, a group of politically motivated Black artists, poets, writers, dramatists, and musicians in the 1960s and 1970s.

In the ensuing years, as her daughters got older and her reputation flourished, Saar began leaving familiar places behind to pursue artistic inspiration, often looking for quirky or off-the-beaten-trail experiences. “Whenever I’d give a lecture, I’d ask, ‘Is there anybody here in the audience who knows of an alternative place of worship, with shrines or relics, or a hand-built or folk art environment?’” Saar found different spiritual practices to be of particular interest. “There’s always someone who’d say: ‘Well, there’s this guy that lives down the street from me. He has his funny little yard.’ And that’s where they would take me.”

“She’s incredibly curious and interested in a foreign experience, gathering not only things along the way but also ideas and feelings, which are presented as real-time reactions in her sketchbooks,” says Greenwald. “Physical and emotional materials gathered while traveling inspire her finished sculptures.”

Creative Curating

Greenwald was just kicking off a new curatorial position at the Gardner when a chance visit to the LACMA exhibition exposed her to Saar’s sketchbooks in 2019. She was immediately struck by the similarities between Saar and Isabella Stewart Gardner, the charismatic heiress who created her eponymous museum in 1903.

Aware of the Getty Foundation’s Paper Project initiative, which also helps curators of prints and drawings grow their skills and engage contemporary audiences, Greenwald recognized the opportunity to create something special: a study of two magnetic women seeking artistic inspiration in two very different time periods, yet who shared the same adventurous spirit and keen aesthetic eye.

“The Gardner is one of my favorite museums,” says Saar, who lectured there in 1994 and subsequently devoured Mrs. Jack, a biography of Gardner by Louise Hall Tharp that details Gardner’s myriad travels.

Between 1867 and 1895, Gardner and her husband visited 39 countries via boat and rail and on foot. And like Saar, Gardner had a penchant for travel journals, adorning pages with watercolors and memorabilia—photographs, botanicals, menus, and postcards—from visits to Italy, Egypt, Sudan, Russia, and beyond. Gardner’s 28 albums became repositories of international inspiration, from a black-and-white snapshot of a carved wooden mashrabiya in Cairo to a rapturous handwritten entry on her visit to East Asia: “Japan is not a land where men need pray, for it’s itself divine.” Just as with Saar, whose sketchbooks led to later sculptural assemblages, Gardner’s albums would ultimately inform her art collection and museum, known for its many temporal and geographical architectural influences.

“It has been an incredible opportunity, creating a meaningful dialogue between past and present,” says Greenwald, counterposing the two women wanderers. “Working with Betye and hearing her travel reactions has helped me better understand Isabella’s goals in creating an experiential museum focused on placing particular objects together based on intuition.”

The project enabled Greenwald to play with innovative ideas. For one, she has collaborated with a sound designer to develop exhibition audio clips. Visitors to Heart of a Wanderer will wind through galleries arranged by continent, using a QR code to be greeted by global sounds from the 1970s, just as Saar would have experienced. “Whether it’s music or conversation, machinery or nature, it will immerse you in a completely different context,” says Greenwald.

Greenwald has also designed an interaction between a large cabinet in which Gardner placed numerous souvenirs and Saar’s assemblage Objects, Obsessions, Obligations (2013), a small shelf of found objects. “Not every contemporary artist is comfortable with a Gilded Age, 19th-century installation next to their work,” says Greenwald, who approached Saar with the idea and received her blessing. Also, knowing that Saar likes density, Greenwald steered clear of the typical “white cube” museum experience, instead using color and placing many works together. “In Betye fashion, we’re building an assemblage of assemblages.”

Betye Saar at Getty

In 2018 the Getty Research Institute announced the acquisition of Saar’s archive as part of its African American Art History Initiative, an effort to collect, study, and disseminate African American art history. Ranging from 1926 to the present, the archive features documentation of Saar’s entire career and life as an artist.

“As a child of the Depression, I learned at an early age the importance of saving things,” said Saar in 2018 about the acquisition. “I’ve taken great pride in preserving these items for some 80-plus years. I am very pleased that the Getty Research Institute shares my desire for ‘saving things’ and that they will be providing a home for many of my collections so that they will be accessible by scholars, the arts community, and the generally curious alike.”