Passing the torch: Alison Saar and evolving Black legacies at The Benton

Turning the corner at The Benton Museum of Art, viewers are struck by a life-size female statue covered head to toe with metal butterflies; they surround her wholly, resting on her wooden skin and splattering the white walls of the gallery. Despite the way they engulf her, she stands calm. Questioning the body’s relationship with the natural environment, “Sea of Serenity” is making its first appearance from The Benton’s permanent collection. However, it is far from the first 5C showcase for the piece’s creator, Alison Saar SC ’78.

Saar is one of five artists featured in The Benton’s latest exhibit, “Black Ecologies in Contemporary American Art” which focuses on the relationships among Black people, land and the environment. While Saar is just one piece of this show, she stands as a leader of the cultural canon of the Claremont Colleges, continuing the efforts of her family and mentors to uplift Black art at the 5Cs and beyond.

Saar has four works in the exhibit: a sculpture and three prints that focus on the nature of Black femininity and the body. Her prints are muted, using earthy blues, greens and browns to create scenes of women in and of nature.

“The theme of ‘Black Ecologies’ considers how African Americans have … built environments in distinct ways to allow themselves to survive and thrive … against adverse conditions,” Victoria Sancho Lobis, director of the Benton Museum, said. “Alison Saar’s work has, for many years, been informed by the effects of the natural environment or even natural disasters.”

Her 2016 work “Deluge” partially covers her subject’s body with her hair. Against a green backdrop, her subject becomes part of her landscape, her hair growing as a tree does, both obscuring her while ensuring her outline shows through.

On “Lethe,” another of Saar’s prints in the exhibition, Cherene Sherrard-Johnson, one of the curators of “Black Ecologies,” described its connections to a natural collective consciousness.

“I like to think Lethe’s rings represent the limits of memory,” Sherrard-Johnson wrote in “In Here: Conversations on Solitude,” a book published by the Benton during the pandemic. “Like the concentric circles revealed on an ancient tree stump, each marks a decade, a romance, a career, an entire lifespan.”

Her work may only take up one corner of the exhibition space, but this is far from the first time the Claremont Colleges have seen Saar’s work. She attended Scripps as an undergraduate, graduating with a B.A. in Art History in 1978, and has found great acclaim in the art world since.

Saar was born in 1956 to Betye and Richard Saar, who were both impactful artists in their own right. After attending Scripps, she attended the Otis College of Art and Design and received her master of fine arts. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Art Museum, and she was commissioned by the International Olympic Committee for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.

Saar has also been an artist in residence at Studio Museum in Harlem, and one of her larger pieces, “Swing Low: A Memorial to Harriet Tubman,” lives on West 122nd Street in New York. Saar gifted a reduced version of this piece to Scripps in 2010, which can be found in the sculpture garden outside the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery.

“Black Ecologies” is the most recent showcase of her works at the Claremont Colleges. In 2000, she and her sister showcased their work in the exhibition “Spirit in Matter: Works by Alison and Lezley Saar” at Scripps’ Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery. The exhibition was the first to showcase the sisters’ works together and was a testament to their family’s continued legacy, as both of their works were influenced by their upbringing. 

“Alison and Lezley saw in their mother’s art a fusion of the material and the spiritual, and this merger is something that they have reinterpreted in distinctive ways in their own art,” Mary Davis MacNaughton, then Director of the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, wrote in the catalogue for “Spirit in Matter.”

More recently, the Williamson Gallery hosted a solo showing of Saar’s work with “Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar” in 2020.

Though Saar’s connection to Scripps is clear, in the past half-decade, she has found her home at the Benton. Her solo show, “Of Aether and Earthe,” was the museum’s first exhibit during its intended opening in 2020 and was on display for 14 months through December 2021. Her statue, “Imbue” permanently stands outside the museum’s main entrance. Her works also populate the museum’s permanent collection. Her presence is felt so deeply throughout the Benton that there is a smaller version of her statue tucked away on the shelves of the museum’s staff offices.

Describing the importance of Saar’s relationship with the museum, Lobis cited Saar’s mentor and professor at Scripps, the legendary artist, scholar and curator, Samella Lewis.

“I’m honored and delighted that I get to see the work of Alison Saar every day when I come to work, in part because I think she embodies the spirit of Samella Lewis,” Lobis said. “Alison also has a commitment to engaging with students and to giving back … It’s a lovely way to mark the legacy of impactful teachers.”

Saar knew Lewis as a family friend long before she came to Scripps. A prominent scholar and artist in the Los Angeles area during the Black Arts Movement, Lewis collaborated with Saar’s mother, Betye, numerous times during the 1970s, including for the iconic Los Angeles gallery The Woman’s Building — then called Womanspace — in 1973 and an exhibition at Scripps.

Curated by Lewis and featuring work from Betye Saar, “Benny, Bernie, Betye, Noah and John — Black Artists,” ran from Dec. 1970 to Feb. 1971 at Scripps’ Lang Galleries. According to a Dec. 17, 1970, article in the Los Angeles Sentinel, the exhibition was, at the time, “one of the largest and most comprehensive group exhibits of black artists’ work to be shown in Southern California.”

A few years later, Lewis would be a key influence in Saar’s decision to attend Scripps, she explained in an interview with Riot Material.

“When I got out of high school, I was kind of neither here nor there, and she said, well, why don’t you apply to Scripps College?” Saar said in the Riot Material interview. “I don’t think I would have applied otherwise, and it was phenomenal working with her.”

Throughout her career, Saar has regularly named Lewis as one of her most important mentors. In a 2023 Ursula essay written in memory of Lewis following her passing, Saar described how Lewis tailored her teaching style specifically for 5C students.

“Scripps was a small school, and one of the things Samella did for students was give us the ability to work with the college’s art collection, to study and to curate it,” Saar wrote. “So much knowledge about artwork comes from the textures and the patinas and the overall feel, that objects should not be stagnant and sealed off. Being able to see the pieces close-up — not just as an image on a slide — and even sometimes to handle them, was a formative experience for me and for many other young artists at the school.”

According to Lobis, Saar’s prints and sculptures in the Benton’s permanent collection are regularly requested for class visits. Additionally, the descriptions in “Black Ecologies” are all written by students, who, in line with Lewis’ teaching philosophy, studied the artwork in a less formal setting, engaging with them out of their frames.

“My hope is that students have not only the chance to interact with the works directly themselves, but also can see what it feels like to interact with the work of art behind the scenes,” Lobis said.

Lewis herself is a crucial figure in the legacy of Black art through her own work, curation and comprehensive scholarship that included the seminal textbook “Art: African American.” The first Black woman to ever obtain a doctorate in fine arts and the first Black professor in Scripps’ history to receive tenure, Lewis is often credited as the “Godmother of African American Art.” 

While she was an artist herself, her legacy lies largely in her ability to recognize and uplift artistic minds. She was one of the founders of Los Angeles’ Museum of African American Art and the International Review of African-American Art, a scholarly journal that has given institutional credibility to Black artists, both of which she established in the same year. 

“She had a way of getting things done that was absolutely unwavering,” Saar wrote of her mentor for Ursula.

In 2007, Scripps launched the Samella Lewis Collection, dedicated to her legacy of uplifting contemporary work by Black artists, including art by both Alison and Betye Saar.

In 2023, in honor of her contributions to Scripps and the art world as a whole, works from her collection were showcased in the exhibition “Gettin it Done: A Selection of Work by Elizabeth Catlett, Samella Lewis, Betye Saar, Emma Amos, Alison Saar, Letita Huckaby, LaToya Hobbs and Kenturah Davis.”

The exhibit presented multiple generations of Black women whose art fundamentally changed the landscape of Black artisanship through their innovative use of materials, highlighted by the relationship between Lewis and two generations of Saar women.

Saar’s work on display at the Benton only further emphasizes the significance of Black art at the Claremont Colleges. Curated by professors and guided by students who had the hands-on experience that Saar herself did, the show immerses the viewer in the varied experiences of Blackness.

“I’m honored that we are caretakers of her work,” Lobis said. “It’s a pleasure to live with the work behind the scenes, but now to see it back in the galleries, it’s a lot of fun.”