2025 New Editions: Alison Saar, Razin Cane II

Alison Saar, Razin’ Cane II, 2025. Click to view

Alison Saar’s Razin’ Cane II evolved through the process of developing her large-scale print, Razin’ Cane, that debuted earlier this year at her solo exhibition, Sweet Life, at Galerie Lelong in Paris. This small work revisits the same linoleum block that served as the starting point for Razin’ Cane; in this format, printed on found vintage sugar sacks, it creates an intimate, tactile experience between viewer and work. 

Whereas Razin’ Cane, printed on a 6 1/2 x 9 1/2-foot canvas, recalls history painting in its monumental scale, referencing the brutal legacy of French colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade as well as the resistance of enslaved African women and girls, Razin’ Cane II brings that history into sharper, more immediate focus through its humble, historically charged textile support. The material and content are interdependent: the sourced sugar sacks underscore the realities of plantation labor and evoke the artist’s own lineage. Saar’s mother’s grandmother was a native of New Orleans—a city known as “Sugar Country” and shaped profoundly by French colonial rule.

The material and content are interdependent: the sourced sugar sacks underscore the realities of plantation labor and evoke the artist’s own lineage.

The edition size of 24 was determined by the number of sugar sacks Saar was able to source for this project. She carved the key block in her studio in Los Angeles and then sent it, along with color sketches, to Tandem, where our printers assisted in developing additional blocks used to print the color layers in this six-color image. For accurate registration, the sugar sacks were temporarily mounted on a sheet of paper to stabilize the fabric’s weave before being printed in multiple runs. Blue, brown, yellow, and silver layers were printed from linoleum cut blocks using our hydraulic press, followed by a white screen printed layer, before the final key block was printed in black, uniting the image. Because the vintage sugar sacks carry their own material irregularities, the work is a varied edition, with each impression revealing subtle differences in weave, markings, and embedded histories.

---

Alison Saar (b. 1956 in 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. Through her sculpture, drawings, and prints, Alison Saar explores the subjects of racism, sexism, ageism, and the specific challenges of being bi-racial in America. Saar’s style encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the plurality of her experiences. She often incorporates found objects such as rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, and glass vessels into her sculptures or chooses to draw and print on vintage fabrics instead of paper. Her work depicts defiant and strong figures and boldly comments on issues relating to gender, race, heritage, and history. 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 and a monument to the Great Northern Migration in Chicago. Most recently, she was commissioned to create 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. 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, Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, 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.

---

Click here to view all available works by Alison Saar