Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean features the washboard assemblages of seminal contemporary artist Betye Saar (b. 1926). Her ongoing series explores the washboard as a crossroad of race, gender, class, and labor and an emblem of America's unresolved legacy of slavery and oppression. Our exclusive catalogue includes essays by the curator, a renowned scholar of African American art history, and the artist herself as well as color reproductions of all objects in the exhibition that was on view at The New York Historical November 2, 2018 - May 27, 2019.
Forewords by Suzanne Isken, Executive Director, Craft & Folk Art Museum, and Louise Mirrer, President and CEO, The New York Historical. Introduction by Holly Jerger, Exhibitions Curator, Craft & Folk Art Museum, and essays by Stephen Nelson, University of California, Los Angeles, and Betye Saar.
Betye Saar is widely recognized as one of the most distinguished figures in American contemporary art. A key figure in the Black Arts Movement and the feminist art movement of the 1960-70s, her distinct vision harmonizes the personal and the political. Her assemblage pieces confront the continued racism in American society through intimate works whose material and imagery deconstruct stereotypes and acknowledge the complexity that exists in all human beings. This exhibition focused on one facet of her work—washboards—created between 1997 and 2017.
