- Alison Saar: I really love working with wood.
And I think not having been trained as a sculptor,
it was the most accessible thing.
[chainsaw whirring]
Most people think of the chainsaw
as just cutting straight, but it can become like a file.
You can kind of, like, just skim surfaces off
and things like that.
It's an amazing tool.
And now that they've making these little ones,
I'm really getting into these kind of finer detail things.
The smell of wood being cut,
it's just really beautiful and rich,
and just that it's a living thing is really important to me.
[chisel scraping]
I really love the chisel marks
because it becomes a faceted surface, which I love,
'cause then it also feels like is it stone or is it wood, or?
It shows the mark of the hand and the stroke of the hand.
I'm a native Angeleno.
I grew up in Laurel Canyon.
After living in New York for 15 years,
it felt like the right move to come back.
- What's this little tree here?
- Pomegranate.
And now I live a mile from my mother.
Both my parents were artists.
My mother, Betye Saar, is a sculptor, painter, printmaker,
and installation artist, assemblage artist.
And then my father, Richard Saar,
conservator and ceramicist.
I think my own work kind of falls
between the influences, between both of them.
While my mother was very well-known
and I was influenced by her work,
I would spend my afternoons with my father,
and it was kind of a really traditional apprenticeship.
"Voluptuous Mummy."
All of the little strips are pieces of linen
that was cut off of paintings that my father was remounting.
And so I gathered them all.
And there's pieces of tin and rawhide
from my dog's rawhide bones.
And so all these things wrap her up.
Underneath all of that, there's this very sexy lady.
Simon Rodia had a role in that piece,
'cause the mask flips up and you can see this mosaic face.
We were introduced to the Watts Towers really early.
I think I was three at the time.
That's one of my earliest memories of a piece of art.
We were also really friendly
with the artists that were part of Watts Towers Art Center,
Noah Purifoy and John Outterbridge.
Those were artists that were a really big part
of my mother's art circle.
- My grandmother lived on 117th,
but 107th Street was sort of the downtown
or the business area.
And to get to that,
we would pass a man making these strange buildings.
I would ask my grandma, "What's he doing?"
They were the beginning of the Watts Towers.
The fact that he just found objects
and put them together,
subconsciously, that aroused my creative energy.
"Spirit Catcher,"
which is a series of basket weaving constructions
that come up like a tower.
That's where that comes from.
- I grew up playing on that piece.
I used to, like, I know.
I used to look at it all the time
and kind of, like, play around it.
And there was definitely a sense of anything can be art.
That was, like, the seed of the idea of,
- Any kind of materials. - Collecting, yeah.
- Any kind of materials can be made into art.
And not only is it materials, but it's ideas and thoughts,
and philosophies and everything like that.
- Alison: Yeah. - Maddy: Yeah.
Grand Betye has inspired me and influenced me
in so many different ways.
I grew up in her studio.
I grew up watching the way that she picks up objects
and thinks about them.
I grew up with her thinking of composition,
telling me important parts of history and stories.
I learned to think of my identity in a different way,
and how to use my power.
- I think another thing that you have inherited
from your grandmother is all of the components
of the occult.
- Yeah, and symbolism.
Absolutely. - Alison: Yeah.
- Betye: But behind that is the interest
in other layers of consciousness.
- Maddy: Yeah.
- Because that's where I feel that real creativity comes from.
The kind that we're interested in.
[tranquil music]
- I was making a body of work that was a reflection
of my upbringing and this sort of
generational magic between the women in my family.
What I mean by generational magic
is this curiosity that was brought down through all of us.
It's the way that we question things and investigate things.
We surround ourselves
with things that we have put meaning into.
Storytelling and lore is really important.
And I think that is why we collect objects
and use 'em in our practice.
They tell narratives.
- So this piece I'm roughing out,
she's going to be wearing a girdle made of skillets.
These skillets become a protection,
but they also point towards women
and their sort of activities within the kitchen.
Really what felt like home,
what was Thanksgiving and Christmas and 4th of July
and Mother's Day, was all my mother's family.
The African-American part of my ancestry
really was at the forefront of who I am,
and why I identify as Black,
even though people often perceive me as white.
You know, that's why I'm really insistent
on making art about my African-American ancestry.
Some of these pieces are directly responses
to some of the news.
But I think the work has always been
about the same sort of things.
It'll always been about the need for equity and justice.
[tranquil music]
"Si J'etais Blanc" was one of my first sculptures.
He looks very much like the four by four he started out as.
He is a tribute to Simon Rodia, in that he has mosaic pants on.
Some really snazzy mosaic pants on.
The title is, "If I Were White,"
which is the title of a song made famous by Josephine Baker.
It's a song lamenting all of her trials
and tribulations because of the color of her skin.
And actually, he has a little door
that opens up in his chest,
and if you look beyond all the broken glass,
there's an image of Josephine Baker, really tiny.
[tranquil music]
Having coming from a family of my mother,
who's a really powerful Black female,
and my grandmother, who was an educator,
who was really a powerful Black female.
You know, that they're all really intense ladies,
and so I feel like it's something I really compelled
to carry on.
[tranquil music]
For the larger pieces,
I'll start covering it with the ceiling tin.
I just love that it has this history,
and I feel it has a memory as well.
It's been in these apartments and witnessed, you know,
fish fries or Seders, or all these things.
Ceiling tin also takes on these ideas of scarification,
and tattooing and identification through how you mark your body.
And it also metaphorically becomes fortification,
that it becomes an armor.
Her skin is impervious to pain or abuse,
or all of those things.
The materials become witnesses,
and they bring that knowledge to the piece,
and I think it enriches the work a lot.
I hope it does.
- Irene Georgia Tsatsos: Alison Saar has done
a number of works of figures that are suspended.
It's a disturbing image.
But she puts her figures in positions
that they can move from.
[tranquil music]
One half of the exhibition,
Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe,
is here at the Armory Center for The Arts
in Pasadena, California.
The other half is with the Benton Museum of Art
at Pomona College.
- Aether is the mysterious element that moves
in and around and between.
It's an essence that connects all the other elements.
It just speaks to our exhibition
at two different venues with Aether floating in between.
What makes Alison's work so compelling
is her efforts to reclaim the narratives
of gender and race by presenting ordinary individuals
as agents of their own change,
and their monumentality in this life.
Her works, I like to think of them as monuments to hope.
- You know, it has its own life.
Once it leaves your studio, it gathers energy
and disperses energy and becomes something else.
It just needs to get to the point
where it can tell its story, and then I let it be.
[tranquil music]