The Los-Angeles based mixed-media artist and sculptor refuses to shy away from the complications and discomforts lineage and history offer, instead rooting her practice deep in that rich soil.
Established by the High Museum of Art in 2005, the David C. Driskell Prize mirrors the understated gravitas of the artist, scholar, the man it is named for in Alison Saar’s estimation. Driskell passed in 2020 after a decades long career which broke open notions of American art canon, establishing the groundwork for African American art history as the distinct field it exists as today. In his spirit, the prize aims to recognize “defining contributions” to Black art in the U.S. context, honoring Saar as this year’s recipient. Naomi Beckwith, Adrienne L. Childs, Amy Sherald, Jamal D. Cyrus are all also counted among the prize alumni. There’s certain poetry to the appointment this year as Saar’s own practice is steeped in explorations of heritage, history, gender, race—a spiritual and conceptual successor to the works of her mother, artist Betye Saar whose recent announcement of forming a curatorial group adds deeper import to interrogating efforts of preserving scholarship and robust engagement with Black American art and the dutiful stewardship thereof.
Ahead of accepting the honor at the High Museum’s annual gala for the occasion, Saar delves into the prize’s continued significance for expanding the American canon while also reflecting on public art’s invitations, voyeurism and eBay’s material potential. How does one steward a legacy? How do we live on? Here, both offerings and safe harbors through the storm of seeking answers.
Arimeta Diop: I would love to hear a bit about your earliest memory of the prize, and particularly with David Driskell himself.
Alison Saar: I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that I had no knowledge of the Driskell Prize until I got that phone call. It was really doubly exciting in that regard. In some ways, it says a lot about David Driskell himself, because we were friends and I always admired him both as a scholar, as an artist, and as a supporter of other artists. I would see him once a year up in Maine and he had never mentioned it, so it talks about how humble he was, how he’s so generous and never was calling attention to himself for the many things he’s done for so many people. It’s a comment on the way David operated throughout the years, being so many things to so many people and never putting himself first.
I first became aware of him through my mentor, Dr. Samella Lewis, who I think had a similar trajectory. She was very much putting the word out about contemporary Black artists. Because I wasn’t on the East Coast, she really was my connection to David as well. She introduced me to him and then, of course, seeing his show, “Two Centuries of African American Art,” really opened my eyes to so much art and the history of Black art in the States. We weren’t seeing those things in museums or they were far-flung, so to have the opportunity to see all these pieces in one space — and the catalog is still sitting on my shelf. It’s getting a little dog-eared and a little worn in form, but yeah, it’s really an essential component to my library.
AD: As you’d become aware of the prize, was there a moment you went back into the archive of those who had been awarded it in the past? What did you find, or connect to?
AS: Maybe because of my own trajectory, when I started out in school and why I was studying with Samella Lewis was because I was conflicted about being an artist or an art historian, so I understand wanting to delve into both directions. I turned out to be a better artist than scholar, so I ended up letting go of the other part.
I think what I really love about this prize specifically is that it alternates between scholars and artists, and I think it’s just so essential. So many of the scholars that have received the grant I’ve worked with. Actually, I just did a talk yesterday with Willie Coles, who apparently was a really early recipient, so that was really lovely to see how it was essential for him as still being a young artist at that point in time.
AD: This moment continues foregrounding conversations of art history, the canon, Black history, our own understandings of what is truth in some ways. To what end we engage legacies. For instance, to the Los Angeles fires some reactions brought up Octavia Butler, her writing.
I think your work, in many ways, is a balm. You mentioned you were a better artist than you’re a scholar, but I do think the scholarship comes through in the art. What is your own sense of time and legacy as it relates to your practice and your own engagement with that?
AS: When I was doing work really circling around Katrina and the horrors of Katrina, and we’ve just now hit the anniversary and Spike Lee’s response to how the so-called recovery has gone so far, which is also scary, to look at that and then think in terms of if we’re going to have to suffer similar facades in the rebuilding of Altadena. Hopefully, bringing all of that to light and how there are many people hand shaking and hand grabbing at the moment, but 20 years down the line, will Altadena be back to what it is, or will these people be able to have a space and have a community that they had beforehand?
For me, I went and looked at the historical Mississippi floods of 1927 to talk about Katrina, because one, I did not want to be one of many that were out there basically using this disaster. I didn’t want it to be disaster tourism. I did that work some five years after, which was also part of why I felt compelled to — was because, five years after [Katrina], I did a residency in New Orleans, and walking through the Treme, all those houses. Stuff was still thrown out the windows, still X’s on the door, nothing had changed in those five years. What I wanted to do was somehow address the similarities between the great Mississippi flood, getting side by side those images of people on the highway overpass and African Americans, mostly sharecroppers being forcibly put on the levees. They were basically imprisoned on these levees. They were encampments where they weren’t allowed to leave, because that was their labor force. Just to see how, side by side, looking at these images, the similarity of people standing on their roofs then and then in Katrina.
I used the tool of looking at things historically to talk about the present, because it really talks about how we are still in it. Not much has changed. A lot of people are completely unaware of what happened in 1926 and ’27 with the Mississippi flood and the severity of it. It’s an opportunity to educate people about that, but it’s also an opportunity to say, “If in 80 years nothing has changed, what can we do in the next 10, 15, 20 years to create this change?” I use those stories as a tool, and they’re also just really inspiring, to see how people have come through those situations.
I don’t want to romanticize it by using disaster and pain and grief to become stronger, because that’s something that we’re always saddled with, and I’m like, “We’re tired of having to live up to that storyline.” The fact is that those things also bring change, and that, as a really resilient and inventive community, we often find ourselves creating new worlds out of destroyed ones.
AD: With regard to Altadena, one sentiment I was getting was the way people were almost hand waving, saying, “Well, Butler predicted all of this, so what can we even do?”
AS: I see what you’re saying. Well, then have any of them read the second book?
AD: Exactly.
AS: What becomes of all of that, how does that resolve itself?
That symposium, I wasn’t a part of it but I was present for it, that Huntington [Library] put together, in some ways, we see this dark future and this assumption that it is all fiction. Not necessarily. Aside from the fires and, it being a natural disaster, similar to Katrina, the true disaster was the aftermath, and the true disaster is the lack of assistance and help. I think the recovery in the Palisades will be very different from the recovery in Altadena, and I hate to say that. I believe that may be true.
AD: I think that you were touching on it, but I happened to be at the Ford Foundation Gallery last night for a discussion on clay and vessels. Dr. Jareh Das, was talking about Nigerian coil techniques, and it felt almost, in some ways, a perfect prelude to this conversation. Women working in craft traditions, but also pulling from the iconography of folk art, pulling from the iconography of craft work; aesthetically informing these practices that were talked about here, but then also, in some ways, in your practice as well.
AS: My daughter’s a ceramicist. That’s her calling now, and then my father was a ceramicist, and so I’m really intrigued with clay, and talk about this sort of legacy between my daughter and her grandfather, who passed when she was still really young. I guess I dumped her there one day—I was going to work or something—at his studio, and he gave her a lump of clay. He went on and was working, and she was really quiet, and he came back and she had made 50, little, tiny pinch pots, because her hands were so tiny and it was just like, “Whoa.” She just jumped right into it, so it’s interesting how family ancestors kind of point us towards things, and I think, in many ways, of course, my mother, and I feel almost, I don’t want to say burdened by that legacy.
That’s one of the reasons why I was really looking into becoming an art historian, because I felt those were really big shoes to fill or a big shadow to crawl out from under. I see that in my kids. They’re all artistic, but they each have tried to find their own path.
I think, for myself, somehow I managed to go through undergrad and grad school, and never really took any real sculpture classes, and so I kind of had to teach myself how to make sculpture. I didn’t know the real bonafide art techniques and technologies, I was kind of making things up. My dad gave me some carving tools, and I got a hunk of wood, and I started carving, was how I became a sculptor. I think I asked my mother, “What were your first experiences being in, of art?” Of course, her mother sewed and we all sewed when we were growing up. I’ve got two sewing machines, and I continue to sew in my practice as well, and just love that. I don’t want to say lowbrow technologies or craft technologies, because they’re always so demeaned by those terms, but the idea that it is not something that you need to go out and spend $500 a gallon for indigo. You can just walk down the street.
When I was living in Brooklyn, that’s where all my materials came from. In the Studio Museum in Harlem, all the materials came from the back lot, dragged everything in, dragged stuff on the subway. It, one, allowed for invention in a way that traditional means and materials didn’t, but also those materials to me contained a spirit, in that these were things that had been previously used. I’m really attracted to skillets because of my grandmother’s skillet and all of the amazing things that came out of that vessel, and just really intrigued with materials that speak to an anonymous legacy. Is that an oxymoron? I don’t know.
An ancestry of unnamed and unknown people that have come before us, that have prepared the world that we step into.
AD: I love this term, anonymous legacy. I’m wondering how you conceive of yourself making when you are bringing in materials that have these tender histories attached to them, and presenting them in environments that maybe only want to consume, commodify, shrink down?
AS: That’s the catch-22 of being a person of color in the art world. We need that support. We need those sales in order to make the work, but the hope is that these works find their ways to preferably free museums or institutions that do not charge admission: just because it’s in a museum, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be seen by people that did not have $25 in their pockets to hand over to step through the doors in the first place.
I think that’s part of my attraction or why I feel that making public art is really essential, because these are pieces that anyone and everyone can see: these are not even people looking for art. They just happen to walk by it, and it’s there, and they can just keep walking or they can take a moment to really look at it. Some people even take the time to see who had made it, but that it has a presence.
It’s kind of weird how these objects take on a life of their own. I know that the Tubman piece, I don’t know if you were aware of all of the controversy when it was first erected and that she was faced in the wrong direction. “Alice Saar is ignorant of which way the Underground Railroad went,” and all of that stuff. What’s great about that, and what I loved about that debate, because while I was installing it — you know Harlem, people are walking up to you, talking to you, and chatting you up every moment. And we would have these discussions.
I said, “Well, have you ever thought about how she managed to keep coming north? Well, she had to go south” and then they would have conversations with their neighbors. They said, “Well, that artist said this.” It just ended up being this really incredible dialogue within the surrounding neighborhood, and she’s now, I think, embraced for her, I guess it’s her death day, because we don’t know what day she was born.
School children come and lay flowers at the monument and celebrate and talk about her history, and I think someone had sent me an image of the women’s labor movement, using her as a starting point to commence their march. And so. I love that she’s become things that were maybe never my intention to other people, and I think that’s what’s really great about public art and having art accessible to the public, that it goes beyond the artist.
AD: When you are presenting or installing work, what is that conversation maybe you are having even before the audience or the onlooker gets there?
AS: Yeah. Well some of them really directly have that embedded in it. The piece I did in Paris, Salón, which is a figure with these six chairs surrounding her, it’s really meant as a space to try to somehow convince people that maybe they don’t need to rush to get that latte or whatever and you can maybe sit down for five seconds and take a moment to look at the art and maybe take a moment to have a conversation with someone who you don’t know. Yeah, sit down and take some time out and you don’t need to look at the sculpture, you don’t even need to think about the sculpture, but just think about something other than whether you’re late or where you got to be here and when and now. Also, again, this idea to promote conversations between people.
The location of that piece is between the Petit Palais and the Place de la Concorde. And it’s a really historical, tense space and a lot of the creation of that space came out of the blood and sweat of enslaved Africans in the Caribbean and the sugar industry. It’s a charged spot, a physically charged spot. I think the US Embassy is also right next to it with everyone standing with their machine guns outside the front. It’s an intense space. And then you go up the Champs-Elysees and it’s all these ridiculously hyper wealthy shopping spaces and the Louvre at the other end. It was intriguing to just have this place and I am really grateful for the Olympics’ Committee in Paris for negotiating that space as opposed to putting it outside of the city limits and kind of centering it.
That’s another thing: that there was some questioning within the Black community, which is largely outside of the city limits, outside of the gate line, “why isn’t that coming to us? Why don’t we have that here?” But instead, I was really intrigued with the idea, well this is an invitation to let you know that this is your space as well. Like, your ancestors helped build this space, you should feel more at home here than anybody because the history and the torment that your ancestors went through is how this space even came to be. You should definitely feel that you belong here and you should occupy it.
AD: What is that spiritual practice for you as it relates to the materiality of a work? Is it a vision first and then you go seek out the objects or do certain objects call to you?
AS: It was out of a necessity just to find free materials. I moved to New York in ’82 and I was working at the Studio Museum and then I had my residency, but at the time, Harlem was just really in this point of transition, a lot of the buildings had been abandoned, but then a lot of people started moving in and renovating them so there was all this stuff on the street and things like ceiling tin. You can date the ceiling tin according to the style because it went from this very Victorian to this deco style, and so you can kind of know when that was installed. And I just love that it had layers of cooking grease and everything else on it, that it had a real patina of having existed in this space.
And so I took it mainly because it was a means of using the wood that I found and holding it together, so it was out of necessity, again, not having the sculptural technology to know how to do those things correctly. But then these tin sheets became cladding and became armor and also looked like keloiding and really talked about not only the history of having been overlooking Black families since the Harlem Renaissance. I think also I was maybe in my mid to late ’20s at the time, I grew up in Laurel Canyon, I was just this kind of hippie girl, I was always running through the hills and things. So that was my real first experience of living in an urban environment and I felt like I was largely ignorant of a lot of that history. And so I felt not having that myself, that it was great to find these materials that could bring that to, it could bring that sort of spirit and sensibility of that history to the work itself.
It’s harder to find ceiling tin in Los Angeles. I’ve somehow managed to glean stuff or imported stuff from Chicago.
And then the idea in terms of finding these materials — I kept buying scissors for years and years and years, I had no idea why I was buying these scissors until just maybe a few years ago I was reading these articles about them finally fessing up to hair processing chemicals causing uterine cancer. And so it was kind of like, “Oh, well maybe that’s what these are for.” These are for cutting all of that off and coming to terms with our hair as is and not feeling that we need to conform to these other ideas of beauty. So that was the case where I had, I don’t know, 70 scissors that I had had when I was living in New York, I packed them up and brought them here and they’re heavy too, so it’s just like they were compelled to follow me until I finally figured out what they were for. And then sometimes I’m like, “Oh my God, I really need a door.’ And I’ll be walking home from my studio, when I was living in New York, I could do that, and I’d take a different route and I’d take a different route and there’d be a door waiting for me.
So sometimes materials are calling for me if I’m looking for them specifically. It’s a little easier now with eBay. If I do need to find a bunch of stuff, I can just Google it and find some and buy it. But back then it was really just this sort of chance thing and I think that probably a little bit of that was Elegua guiding me down certain streets in terms of what to find and yeah.
AD: Sometimes I try to imagine how our spiritual practices transform or are augmented by the realities of technology. Like, maybe eBay is a kind of spirit realm where we can go and find charged materials.
AS: Maybe pull out some offerings before you start looking stuff up.
AD: Clear the way.
AS: I like that idea.
AD: A recurring image in your prints where the figure is looking at herself and we the viewer only see her face in reflection, whether in mirror or in water. Something about that really caught me up. What do you make of that positioning of viewership where we’re looking at her, but her back is to us; there’s this voyeurism.
AS: There’s kind of two things going on there, voyeur and voyeurism. For one, there was a piece that was called Bain Froid. It was this woman, very Mary Cassatt-like, where she’s bathing in a tub of water. The French were like, “Oh, look at this beautiful voluptuous woman bathing herself in a pot of water.” But for us it was like, “Yeah, this woman is bathing in a wash tub because she doesn’t have plumbing.” And you may think that this is what she wants. So I made her skin blue out of copper. This lady is taking a bath in cold water in a wash tub because she doesn’t have the access to the comforts that other people have and does not have the plumbing or the means to heat the water. And it’s a reminder that the romanticizing — I think people looking back at these images of sharecroppers and people living in houses which are lined with newspaper for wallpaper to keep the cold, the chinks in the building: “Oh, it’s so quaint. And they were so enduring and endearing in their poverty.” That’s not really the story. The story is that there are people that are doing without while there are plenty of folks with too much, and we need to understand the distribution of wealth in this country and why we find these images quaint and charming at all.
So that’s one thing. I really started out doing these drawings, and I think the sculptures themselves and the way they’re positioned and standing, it made me think of those early images of Saartjie Baartman known as the Hottentot Venus and how she was put on display, and then the horrific aftermath where her body parts were put on display. And those really early cards of “The Natives in their environment” or looking at world fairs, about cultures on display and people’s bodies on display. And so a lot of the work and the positioning of these figures were reflective of that. People often ask me why they don’t have pupils, and I think it is a way for that figure to distance herself from her viewer and distance herself from being further victimized. I mean, you may have control of my body, but you do not have control of my spirit or my soul. And so they have kind of clocked out in a way. So that’s the voyeur aspect of the way I deal with it in the work.
Then the other thing with these mirrors, and I was really struck early on by Japanese prints of fox demons, and so it’ll be this beautiful Japanese courtesan, but then you see her reflection on the shoji screen that she’s actually a fox. And about the truth in reflections. And also you think about Dracula, and you can’t see him in the mirror because he ain’t really there. And the idea of haints and reflections and shadows and all of these things. And so it’s really talking about the spirit world and how sometimes things are seen clearly through a looking glass or seen more clearly through this reflection.
And maybe that is talking about the reflection of time, that maybe we have a better understanding of these things and the predicaments we don’t necessarily have the ability to recognize them then and there. Obviously these are things I’m not completely resolved, but it’s an image I’m really fascinated with, and I think the piece that I think you were talking about the print where you see the back of this woman, and she’s holding the pot and you see the reflection of it.
And that was actually really inspired by an image by Roy DeCarava of a man and the back, it was just his back and his shirt, and there’s a tear kind of down the center that has been mended. And it spoke so much of this person who you have no idea who this person is. You don’t see his face whatsoever, but it talks about the labor, it talks about why he doesn’t have a new shirt, but he has had someone mend that shirt, and that whether he himself or someone mended it for him, that there was this care to kind of repair and try to maintain a sense of dignity.
And just this one, a photo is just so powerful to me because it says so many things and without ever seeing this person’s face or understanding who the photograph was of or when or anything that and so I love that sometimes the denial of information becomes an opportunity for us to really imagine and question and try to understand in a way that if we saw someone sitting on the stoop with a tin can in their hand or sleeping on the park bench, we feel like, “Oh, yeah. This person is homeless, let’s move on.”
But really talk about, I think in a weird sort of way, it really talked about their humanity. And again, their anonymity, not knowing who they are, sorry, my words are jumbled, really talks about this not also an individual issue, but also as an issue that we are all kind of responsible and play a role in as well. So as perpetrators or people that help us that are able to help or people that need help, all of those things.
AD: There is so much poetry in the ways that family within itself is passing along stories, traditions and each one embodies something new, carrying something old with them and moving it forward. So I think all of that was coming to mind as I was sitting with those prints in particular.
AS: I love the idea that traditions are constantly being reinvented. Plastic dolls replacing Ibeji dolls then that becomes something else. And Chanel No. 5 is really important on certain altars. That’s how these things are being kept alive. I know in the African art circles, there’s always this sort of disdain when commercial components come into them and the influence of South Asian lithographs become Mami Wata, and there’s this sense that it is somehow tainted by these influences from the greater world.
But the truth is, it becomes more enriched. There was a great series the Met put on with Camille Dungy, the poet, and it was talking about materials. And one of them was the shell. I’m trying to remember the name of it, but it was from Polynesia’s South Sea Islands. And that this shell, this amazing beautiful object that was passed on from family to family to family was now in a museum and whether this belonged in the museum and whether it should be repatriated.
And one of the comments made by one of the people that they were talking to was not a scholar but someone who is of that culture, but they said no. What was really important about the seas and because as having been seafaring from the very beginning of their civilization, that it was really important that the piece be out there in the world and seen by others. And it does not necessarily apply to all objects because some objects are to be private and personal, but she was saying that this piece serves as an ambassador of our community and that it’s out there and people are seeing it and people are becoming curious and people are learning and trying to understand stuff that they don’t understand.
And not necessarily that they’re going to understand everything. And not to say that there isn’t abuse in the colonization of these people, but I thought it was a really beautiful way of looking at one’s art going out into the greater world and what roles those things serve. As these ambassadors to speak of things that if they were just in my home or just in the collector’s home or just in a museum that didn’t give the opportunity for folks to come in, but they’re still out there in the world.
Camille, are you doing another? Where’s phase two? There’s so many other, I thought, well, yeah, because the one on pottery and the one where they’re talking about breaking up the pottery from Mexico and drinking it, and I love that idea that kind of this ingestion of the soil. Wasn’t that powerful?
AD: Untitled Art last year had an installation and performance where this artist made these platters, but it was raw clay, and they bit into it over and over and over again.
AS: One of my first museum shows was at the High Museum — so full circle back to Driskell — and one of the pieces I did was called Terra Firma, and it was really talking about how the role that nature in the South played with the freeing and the reinforcement and the comfort of enslaved Africans in the South. And the one Terra Firma is a woman that’s pregnant and she’s sitting and she’s eating this red Georgia clay soil and she’s by this soil and this idea that here you are a stranger in a strange land about to bring a child into the world and how do you claim this land as your own? Or how do you become part of the space and not be unmoored or unbound? And one of those ways would be to eat that soil. Are you from the South? No, you don’t sound like you’re from.
AD: No, no, I’m Liberian and Senegalese. When my mum came to the States, she would always send back home for clay. I remember one time she was like, “You’re not going to enjoy it.” But then I did have it and it was this jarring taste, but she ate it like it tasted so good. I think about that all the time.
AS: That’s the way that she could stay connected.
AD: Exactly.
AS: When I was there, when I was doing research for the show Fertile Ground, while I was in Atlanta way back when, and actually I was maybe really early on pregnant with my daughter at the time as well. In fact, I kind of blame the piece for, I love my daughter, but any rate, you go into the convenience stores, and there’d be these little packets of kaolin and on it is, “Not intended for human consumption.” But it was right next to the Fritos and right next to all the other stuff. And people would buy this and then they would eat it.
And in some ways it contains the same thing like magnesium and stuff that you need like Pepto-Bismol is basically, so it absorbs stuff, but it is this idea of eating this clay, eating the soil and that it’s deeply rooted in something about being, connecting, back to the soil again.
Written by Arimeta Diop
