2021 New Editions: Alison Saar

Alison Saar draws from her personal identity and experience with racism and sexism in the narratives she tells through her sculptures, drawings, and prints. As a biracial woman with a lighter complexion, Saar sees her hair as an important part of her physical appearance that directly points to her African American heritage. Due to the value she places on her hair, various rituals, expectations, and connotations revolving around hair have occurred as underlying themes throughout much of her work.

Alison Saar, Blonde Dreams, 2021. Click to view.

Alison Saar, Big Singe, 2021. Click to view.

Alison Saar began Blonde Dreams several years ago but did not finish the woodblocks for the print until this past year. The print depicts a figure with cascading gold hair representative of white anglicized beauty standards. The dream of long blonde hair has hamstrung the woman. Strung up by her feet, the woman’s vulnerable posture and vacant eyes suggest that she is not yet aware of her predicament. She has succumbed to the allure of social ideals to modify her Black hair, leading her to sacrifice her natural self-expression.

An alternative to Blonde Dreams, the figure depicted in Big Singe personifies the strong character of Black hair. This piece is related to a series of sculpted hot combs Alison Saar has been creating in recent years. In this print and the hot comb sculptures, Saar recalls her experience growing up hot-combing her hair along with her cousins in her grandmother’s kitchen. She describes the hot combs being used to “press the wildness out of your hair.” Saar creates haints, ghostly spirits of Southern American folklore, as hot comb handles, giving the wildness dispelled from the hair a place to settle. Just as Saar incorporates cast-off objects such as found ceiling tin, dresser drawers, or glass bottles in her sculptures, she often decides to print on found fabrics instead of paper. She embraces the tears, stains, and other wear marks present in the collected materials. Many of the seed sacks Saar selected for the edition of Big Singe also bear logos from their past owners. The inherent history of Saar’s materials lends an even richer narrative to her imagery.

Alison Saar, Congolene Resistance, 2021. Click to view.

Creating another narrative about Black hair, Congolene Resistance reimagines the lid of a tin of congolene, a hair relaxer made from lye popularly used by Black men during the 1920s to 1960s to straighten naturally kinky hair. Again, this piece references the history of Black hair being punished and denied its natural texture. Still, Saar presents a figure with natural “stubborn and kinky” hair, determined eyes, and a hot comb clenched between his teeth. In this depiction, the object of conformity becomes a tool of resistance and survival, playing off the trope of a bad-ass character holding a knife between their teeth. In addition to the pomade tin reference, this artwork could also be viewed as a shield, considering the warrior characteristic of the depicted figure.

Alison Saar, Reapers, 2021. Click to view.

Over the past few years, Saar has been creating work that reimagines the character of Topsy from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In Saar’s work, the slave girl Topsy is re-contextualized from a wild and wicked girl to a symbol of strong-willed defiance. Reapers presents Topsy’s spirit as five children emerging from a cotton field in the night. With cotton branches tied in their hair as camouflage, the girls wield tools of five major slave crops as weapons: a machete for sugarcane, a tobacco knife for tobacco, a hoe for indigo, a sickle for rice, and a bale hook for cotton. Further referencing the slave trade, Saar chose to print this image on pieces of found sugar sacks hand-dyed to the indigo color. As the children have taken up the tools of their labor to wage an attack, the scene references Audre Lorde’s writing:

For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. Racism and homophobia are real conditions of all our lives in this place and time… I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives here. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

Alison Saar, Wrath of Topsy, 2021. Click to view.

If the children depicted in Reapers had a flag to carry with them in their revolution, it would be the Wrath of Topsy. Saar finished this screen print on found seed sacks with a sewn twill edging and grommets. This war banner depicts Topsy with her Medusa-like braided hair as a poster child for resilience and determination to overthrow her oppressors. Saar began creating the work about Topsy after Philando Castile was fatally shot during a traffic stop by a police officer in 2016. Although these artworks by Saar reference historical slavery in our country, they harness and represent a collective rage and frustration for the racial injustices still present in our current times.

Click to view all available works by Alison Saar