2024 New Editions: Alison Saar
![Alison Saar, Mutiny of the Sable Venus [1/24], 2024](https://tandempress.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Saar_Mutiny_of_the_Sable_Venus-01-web.jpg)
Alison Saar, Mutiny of the Sable Venus [1/24], 2024. Click to view.
Through her sculptures, drawings, and prints, Alison Saar explores the subjects of racism, sexism, ageism, and the specific challenges of being bi-racial in America. Her work encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the experiences of several communities, most prominently the African diaspora. She often incorporates found objects such as rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, and glass vessels into her sculptures or chooses to draw and print on vintage fabrics instead of paper or canvas. Her work depicts defiant and strong figures. In recent years, much of her work has recast Black literary characters from racial stereotypes to autonomous subjects.
Her large woodcut, Mutiny of the Sable Venus, responds to several historical references. Her image primarily reacts to an etching created in 1793 by Thomas Stothard titled The Voyage of the Sable Venus from Angola to the West Indies, which depicts an African woman standing on a half-shell, surrounded by cherubs and a possessive-looking Triton carrying the British flag, being towed across the ocean by dolphin-like sea creatures. Stothard created this slave-trade propaganda based on Sandro Botticelli’s painting The Birth of Venus from the mid-1480s to accompany a poem by Isaac Teale titled The Sable Venus, An Ode. This horrendous poem reflects the eighteenth-century characterization of African women as sexual objects as well as objects of labor. It brutally celebrates the pleasures of raping women and invokes Black beauty to point out the superior beauty of whiteness while still registering society’s desire for these “undesirable” women.
In recent years, the poet Robin Coste Lewis critiqued this heinous duo of image and text and other historical representations of Black women in her debut poetry collection Voyage of the Sable Venus and Other Poems, published in 2015. In their reimaginings, both Lewis and Saar reclaim the Sable Venus and present her as a symbol for the emergence of Black women as empowered and in charge of their own lives. Saar’s Venus rides a catfish, brandishing a sickle and blowing a conch shell. She has mutinied against her oppressors—no cherubs or Tritons in sight—and now calls others to free themselves and join her in arms.
Saar stated that this piece may be the most complex woodcut print she has created to date as she rendered the image by carving it on multiple woodblocks that were also later jig-saw cut out to ensure perfect registration of the various layers during the printing process. The image was also printed on vintage seed sacks, a common material that Saar uses in her work to reference crops of the slave trade.

Puzzlecut woodblocks for Mutiny of the Sable Venus

Key woodblocks for Mutiny of the Sable Venus and Li’l Big Sister

Collaborative Printmakers Patrick Smyczek and Joe Freye print the last layer on Mutiny of the Sable Venus
![Alison Saar, Black Eyed Susan [1/15], 2024](https://tandempress.wisc.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/Saar_Black_Eyed_Susan_01-web.jpg)
Alison Saar, Black Eyed Susan [1/15], 2024. Click to view.
Saar turned to slightly lighter content for the rest of her new prints. Her print Black Eyed Susan evokes growth and abundance as it depicts a woman standing with her pregnant belly in a lush green field dotted with black-eyed Susan flowers. Her hair grows high and branch-like above her head as additional blooms sprout from each tip. These flowers entered Saar’s work after she witnessed a super bloom of wild black-eyed Susans growing throughout the area where she lives in Southern California after an intense period of rain. A promise appears among the figure’s hair—“seeds that really grow”—a phrase Saar found stamped on a seed sack. In this piece, Saar reflects on how enslaved women would often chew on cotton roots to abort pregnancies caused by their masters. However, the fertility of this scene spins the message around into one that celebrates pregnancy and the desire to have children.

Alison Saar carves a linoleum block for Black Eyed Susan

Alison Saar signs the completed edition of Black Eyed Susan

Alison Saar, Li’l Big Sister, 2024. Click to view.
In Li’l Big Sister, Saar lovingly depicts a young girl who is a big sister to her younger siblings. She was inspired to create this piece while reflecting on how children are often asked to look after each other in families. Saar recalls hearing stories of how, due to an illness in the family, her mother, at the age of five, was charged with caring for her younger siblings and how that experience had a lasting impact on her character. In Saar’s print, the little girl’s hair rises branch-like into a bottle tree, holding translucent yellow, green, and blue bottles aloft. This image references the centuries-old custom of hanging bottles upside down from tree branches that appeared throughout African, Caribbean, and Creole cultures and became prominent throughout the southern United States. The meaning of the bottle trees has evolved over the years, but they are most popularly viewed as protectors of the home. The bottles trap roaming evil spirits; once inside, the spirits cannot escape and are then destroyed by sunlight. In Li’l Big Sister, the sister captures evil spirits with her bottles and deflects any harm from her younger siblings. Although she is a protector, she is still a child herself. Saar reflects on the strength and resilience of children placed into these roles as reluctant adults or little Atlases as they carry the weight of the world on their shoulders for their families.
Saar began the woodblock for Li’l Big Sister years ago when her daughter was five and she was reflecting on what was asked of her mother at that age. However, she recently revisited and recarved the block earlier this year for this edition. The girl’s dress and the bottles were printed on Kozo, painted with dyed shellac to increase the paper’s translucency, cut out, and collaged over the printed figure.

Mixed dye ready to use to tint paper for collage elements for Li’l Big Sister

Bottles printed on dyed paper, ready to be cut and collaged on Li’l Big Sister

Alison Saar, Crossroad Shuffle, 2024. Click to view.

Alison Saar, Tips from the Boneyard, 2024. Click to view.
In a recent conversation with our curators, Saar recounted childhood memories of having peach fights with her cousins and dancing in the streets late at night while all the adults in the family played dominoes. She shared that she and her daughter have recently begun to play dominoes together to participate in this tradition popular among African American and Afro-Cuban communities, so it is unsurprising to see the game start to appear in her work as well.
In Crossroad Shuffle, a figure grins out from under his hat brim, dominoes in hand, eager for his next turn. His opponent, who appears in Tips from the Boneyard, pauses mid-turn as a spirit figure whispers something in her ear. These depicted actions illustrate the fun, competitive nature of the game and a sense of the banter that often surrounds the domino table. The ghost, a friendly type, references the family history of playing this game that has served as a connecting tissue among diasporic communities.

Alison Saar carves the key linoleum block for Crossroad Shuffle

Collaborative Printmaker Jason Ruhl and Project Assistant David Love print the third layer for Tips from the Boneyard

Alison Saar reviews an early proof of Black Eyed Susan

Alison Saar signs the completed edition of Crossroad Shuffle

Alison Saar discusses proofs with Collaborative Printmakers Jason Ruhl and Joe Freye
Alison Saar (b. 1956, Los Angeles, California) grew up in an artistic environment. Her mother is the acclaimed collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar, and her father, Richard Saar, was a painter and art conservator. Saar received her BA from Scripps College and her MFA from Otis College of Art and Design. She has been awarded many distinguished honors, including a residency at the Studio Museum in Harlem and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Guggenheim Foundation. She has been commissioned to create many public installations, including a sculpture for the Harriet Tubman Memorial in New York, a monument to the Great Northern Migration in Chicago, and a 12-foot-tall figural sculpture to coincide with her notable solo exhibition Of Aether and Earthe, presented by The Armory Center for the Arts and the Benton Museum of Art in 2020-21. Most recently, she was commissioned to create a permanent sculpture for the 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris. A major exhibition of her prints was first shown at the University of North Texas before it toured to seven other institutions (2019-22). She has received the SGCI Lifetime Achievement Award in Printmaking, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, an Anonymous Was A Woman grant, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and more. Her work can be found in numerous museum collections, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts, to name a few. Alison Saar lives and works in Los Angeles, California.