Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail
1973
Betye Saar
American, born 1926
Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
Betye Saar was a prominent member of the Black Arts Movement. Drawing from diverse cultural associations, and influenced both by self-taught artist Simon Rodia’s massive sculptural installation Watts Towers, constructed in the 1960s in her hometown, and by the intimate found-object constructions of American modernist Joseph Cornell, Saar developed a politically potent and personally meaningful practice rooted in assemblage. In Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail Saar transforms a Gallo wine jug, a 1970s marker of middle-class sophistication, into a tool for Black liberation. For Sacred Symbols fifteen years later she transfigures the detritus one might find in the junk drawer of any home into a composition with spiritual overtones.
- Maker/Artist
- Saar, Betye
- Classification
- Sculpture
- Formatted Medium
- Glass, paper, textile, metal
- Dimensions
- Overall: 12 1/2 × 5 3/4 in. (31.8 × 14.6 cm)
- Departments
- Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art
- Accession Number
- 2017.17
- Credit Line
- Purchased with funds given by Elizabeth A. Sackler, gift of the Contemporary Art Committee, and William K. Jacobs, Jr. Fund
- Exhibitions
- We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85, Out of Place: A Feminist Look at the Collection
- Rights Statement
- © artist or artist's estate
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