Betye Saar

Bird, hand, globe, eye, ship; cage, hold, fan, mirror, compute. Betye Saar’s dense cosmology of signs and gestures is at the center of this pair of exhibitions, giving viewers opportunity to take in over half a century of this Los Angeles–based artist’s output. The works here are organized into two conceptually connected yet spatially distinct exhibitions: “Blend” and “Black White.”

The first gathers together a sequence of assemblages, works on paper, and a large techno-voodoo altar, Mojotech, 1987, which is still gloriously weird nearly thirty years on. The four antique cages that dot the room are filled with tchotchkes that carry the weight of everyday reality: Three of the many locks, for example, clipped to the outside of Serving Time, 2010, concisely indict the relationship between class, cultural capital, and the carceral state, with their factory-inscribed texts that read: “Yale,” “Yale Vigilant,” and “Made in the USA.” Across the gallery, in The Destiny of Latitude & Longitude, 2010, two clipper ships are tempest tossed on a sea of gray hair, their journey contained, but perilous nonetheless.

“Black White” is a more forceful curatorial take on Saar’s work, its intensity derived, in part, from the gallery’s close quarters—it is a succinct, room-size installation focused on the synecdochal opposition between black and white. The carpet is dark, and the pedestals and walls alternate between the two colors. When one finds, near the end of the installation, a modest 1964 etching titled Sorceress with Seven Assorted Birds, filled with owl-like apparitions surrounding the outline of a sole standing female figure, one is returned to a truth about Saar’s work—that power is in the magic of making, not unmaking, symbolic worlds.