In memoriam: Betye Saar, 99, alumna, trailblazing artist and storyteller through assemblage

Betye Saar, a UCLA alumna and groundbreaking assemblage artist, died July 26, four days shy of her 100th birthday.

For over seven decades, Saar redefined American art. She transformed racist memorabilia and advertising into powerful reflections on race and resistance. Activist Angela Davis cited Saar's 1972 assemblage "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" as the beginning of the Black Women's Movement. The mixed-media piece, created for a show at The Rainbow Sign cultural center in 1972, transforms a figurine of the racist caricature Aunt Jemima into one of Black liberation, now holding a rifle and a broom. The piece immediately made waves in the Black Arts movement.

Saar's career has been the subject of numerous exhibitions at museums around the world, notably Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and Fondazione Prada in Milan. Her work is in the collections of more than 90 institutions globally, ensuring she will continue to inspire future generations.

Saar's parents met as first-years at UCLA in 1924, and her connection to the university continued well beyond her 1949 degree. She returned to campus for a 1966 show at Dickson Art Gallery, "The Negro in American Art" - a landmark rare, early survey of Black American artists during the Civil Rights Movement that would provide the foundation for Hammer Museum at UCLA's 2011 exhibition "Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960-1980," where her work was also featured. In 1970, she designed costumes for UCLA and Inner City Cultural Center. Those costumes are featured in "Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar," currently on view at Roberts Projects in Los Angeles. In 1990, Saar and her daughter, Alison Saar, presented a two-person exhibition at UCLA's Wight Art Gallery titled "Secrets, Dialogues, Revelations: The Art of Betye and Alison Saar." In 2014, Saar returned to the Hammer for a UCLA Department of Art lecture.

Earlier this year, the Hammer honored Saar at their annual Gala in the Garden. Scholar and curator Sandra Jackson-Dumont said in her tribute, "You have given us language where there was silence, beauty where there was erasure, and possibility where there was constraint. … You have shown us that truth, when spoken through the right hand of an artist like you, can change everything."

Saar shared at the gala, "By you being here, it encourages a lot of other people who are not here to love art, to use art, and to know how important art is in our lives." She went on to share her secret to living a long life: a good diet, nature and being a California girl.