American artist Betye Saar has spent much of her career protesting racial inequality in the United States. A member of the Black Arts Movement in the 1970s, her assemblage and collage pieces from this period confront racism by appropriating and recontextualizing African-American folklore and icons—as per the stereotypical “mammy” figure at the centre of this arresting work. The figurine balances on a set of white teeth, symbolic of white lies, and holds a spoon and a grenade to represent “the duality of her identity and dispel notions of passivity and helplessness,” in the words of the Hammer Museum. Such works served to “reframe negative archetypes of African-American women”, freeing them from oppressive representation, with powerful results.
