In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Los Angeles based artist, Alison Saar.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
This Episode, Emily chats with Los Angeles based sculptor & printmaker, Alison Saar. She was visiting the Bay Area recently working with Arion Press on their recent production of Octavia Butler's Kindred.
They dive Alison's artistic journey, influences, and her recent project illustrating Octavia Butler's 'Kindred' for Arian Press. Alison reflects on her upbringing in a creatively rich environment, heavily influenced by her artist parents, Betty and Richard Saar. She discusses her techniques, particularly her affinity for woodcuts and linoleum blocks, and the importance of texture in her work. The conversation also touches on Saar's interest in African and Indigenous art, her spiritual connections, and significant influences such as Elizabeth Catlett. The episode concludes with insights into Saar's favorite creatively inspiring places in Los Angeles and her experience of continuously making art from a young age.
About Artist Alison Saar:
Alison credits her mother, acclaimed collagist and assemblage artist Betye Saar, with exposing her to metaphysical and spiritual traditions. Assisting her father, Richard Saar, a painter and art conservator, in his restoration shop inspired her learning and curiosity about other cultures.
Saar studied studio art and art history at Scripps College in Claremont, California, receiving a BA in art history in 1978. In 1981 she earned her MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles. In 1983, Saar became an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, incorporating found objects from the city environment. Saar completed another residency in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1985, which augmented her urban style with Southwest Native American and Mexican influences.
Saar’s style encompasses a multitude of personal, artistic, and cultural references that reflect the plurality of her own experiences. Her sculptures, installations, and prints incorporate found objects including rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, glass, and urban detritus. The resulting figures and objects become powerful totems exploring issues of gender, race, heritage, and history. Saar’s art is included in museums and private collections across the U.S.
Visit Alison on the web by CLICKING HERE.
Follow Alison on Instagram: @Alison_Saar
Learn more about her Kindred project with Arion Press HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
Host Emily Wilson: Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 10 2.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM. Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Alison Saar: I think my interest in working with woodcuts or linoleum blocks is that there's a texture, the beauty of using Arion here is that you can actually see the pressure and the texture that the negative space wells up. And so I love that. And the covers actually, you can, you can feel it with your eyes closed.
Host Emily Wilson: That's sculptor and printmaker Alison Saar on this week's episode of Art is Awesome.
I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts. And I've been meeting such [00:01:00] great people that I created this bi weekly podcast to highlight their work.
Alison Saar is an artist in Los Angeles, known for her prints and sculpture. She credits her mother, the acclaimed collage and assemblage artist Betty Saar, and her father, painter and art conservator Richard Saar, for exposing her to different cultures and spiritual traditions which influenced her work.
Allison has an MFA from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, and she was artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. She often uses found objects in her work. And critics say she transforms the figures and objects she makes into powerful totems exploring gender, race, heritage, and history.
These figures and objects are in museums and collections around the world. She has also made public artwork and she was [00:02:00] selected to make a sculpture that will be unveiled at the Paris Olympics this summer.
Alison was in San Francisco recently at Arion Press in the Presidio. Arion works with acclaimed artists to produce two or three books a year, all made by hand. Allison did the illustrations for their most recent one, Octavia Butler's Kindred. We met at the press, and Allison told me she admires what Arion does.
Artist Alison Saar: I've seen their Martin Puryear book Cane, Jean Toomer's novel. So I was always aware of the fine, beautiful work they did. And I had a friend who had worked with them before and suggested I contact them and put us in touch. And then they invited me to choose a book and to work with them. So it was really delightful.
Host Emily Wilson: Octavia Butler was an obvious choice for Alison.
Artist Alison Saar: I think I was really interested in, [00:03:00] first and foremost, looking at Black and female authors, and of course, Octavia Butler is kind of at the top of the list for that for myself, and I was really interested in, I mean, she's been getting a lot of attention specifically with Parable of the Sower because it was so prophetic, but I was really interested in kind of looking at some of her earlier work and Kindred, of course, from 1979, I believe.
Kindred was my first encounter with her coming out of college and, you know, before going on to grad school and just was really struck by how, you know, it was a really unique voice.
Host Emily Wilson: Butler's work shaped hers.
Artist Alison Saar: In some ways, a lot of my work deals with contemporary issues and, you know, problems, but often through a historical lens.
Her kind of going back between these two worlds, and I think her intention as well is to address sort of contemporary issues and the problems, like the prevalence of racism in America and looking at the roots of that and how complicated and convoluted it was to get to the space where we are [00:04:00]now. And hence, by Dana, her hero in the story, kind of spanning these two worlds could kind of really fill in that story for us.
Host Emily Wilson: When Alison reread 1979's Kindred, she was a little surprised.
Artist Alison Saar: I had this memory of the book that I hadn't read in some time. 30 years, I guess, maybe even more. And going back and rereading it, I realized, oh, I made this choice, but it's not right. It's really, really dark. It's very violent. Each chapter begins with an act of violence and ends with an act of violence.
And I was kind of like, well, what is there to illustrate that wouldn't just kind of like compound that? And I just embraced it. And so it is a, it is a series of very violent images. But I think it's really important, especially now that so much of that history is being sort of erased or sort of glazed over and softened by people that would want to kind of change that history. I thought that it, it was maybe a really good time to really talk about how truly brutal and inhumane, um, slavery was in the United States and [00:05:00] how it continues to affect the lives of African Americans in the States as well.
Host Emily Wilson: Alison talked about deciding what scenes from the novel to include.
Artist Alison Saar: So I started out kind of taking it chapter by chapter and reading it and writing down possible images. And then those images sort of developed. Some of them fell by the wayside and some of them I sent up here. I think did two versions of one image and maybe one image I just ditched all together. But I gave them maybe more than they asked for, and they were really lovely and trying to accommodate me with more images than I think they normally take on. It has really been a great collaboration.
Host Emily Wilson: She also told me how she made the prints.
Artist Alison Saar: The process that I'm using here are Lionel cut. Traditionally, I work in woodcut as a wood carver, so you're really dealing with black and white, you have this or that, and you can put color images behind it and kind of augment it that way. But the idea that it just be very stark and very minimal. And I think that's what's really beautiful about, you know, you look at the prints of Kathe Kollwitz or [00:06:00] Elizabeth Catlett, or, you know, I can name a hundred of them, but just these really stark, incredible images.
So I knew that I was kind of working within that really sort of limited palette. I think the image, I was always constantly trying to, you know, even though I'm telling Octavia's story and Dana's story, I wanted it also to kind of be reflective of my own practice.
Host Emily Wilson: There were some ideas coming back to Alison.
Artist Alison Saar: One of them was Dana going through cotton fields, even though They're not specified as cotton in the book, took a little bit of license there and a couple of images I did actually, but that also related to some images I'd been doing talking about children in the cotton field. And I really love this idea of at night and this sort of striking images of the light of the stars and the light of the cotton in bloom and these kind of like dynamics and that everything else is kind of, you have to really seek out the figures in them.
Host Emily Wilson: Alison was exposed to a lot of different cultures growing up. [00:07:00]
Artist Alison Saar: Through my mother, who was always looking at art from Africa and from India and from Indigenous Americans and Indigenous Aborigines. I mean, Australians, South and Central American cultures. I think, you know, that was something that was always just in the home and in the household.
And it was always about kind of an openness. to the existence of all these religions. And so I think that's, I guess you could say spiritual, but wouldn't necessarily say that I'm kind of conscripted to one thing. And I find that there's a lot of overlaps. And I think, you know, interesting in the way that Yoruba practices were brought to the states as how they found a way to exist within Catholicism.They found a way to exist inside of all these other religions.
Host Emily Wilson: That interest in other cultures is reflected in the first illustration in Kindred.
Artist Alison Saar: The other one is the front piece, which is the only one that has a color. It's got a red background. A lot of my work kind of deals with Yoruba religions and it's especially how it is kind of come to the [00:08:00] Americas and taken on different formats and forms.
And I was really intrigued with Dana as being an Alegua figure who's kind of, you know, the guardian of the crossroads or Papa Legba and able to kind of span these two worlds and kind of, um, you know, opens these sort of portals for spirit worlds to come here and for us to enter the spirit world. So I love that notion of her.
So that image is really just sort of a silhouette. Dana, and then in the back is kind of like dialyzed crossroads, kind of pulling off of the babies, Haitian babies for, uh, Papa Legba. So that piece also really, I think kind of sinks into, um, not only my work, but my beliefs and understanding of the world as well.
Host Emily Wilson: Allison says she feels an affinity with the Yemaya, the ocean mother goddess.
Artist Alison Saar: I kind of came to it in a roundabout sort of way. You know, I've always kind of had sort of these really interesting connections with water and some experiences where at one point I [00:09:00] was being. Swept away by a river and was probably didn't go far, but was pulled out of the river by my father.
And it wasn't until I read Ben Okri's book, The Famished Road, that I really started thinking about these spirits trying to call people back into their world. And of course, I realized that I have a really deeply rooted connection with Yemaya. And so I really started exploring that a little bit more and, and I'm really kind of embraced her in terms of guidance in my practice in terms of being lovely and creative and cleansing and cooling and healing all of these aspects of her
Host Emily Wilson: Alison isn't the only one in the family with a connection to water
Artist Alison Saar: When my daughter was born, I was on the subway and someone, typical New York subway, someone looks into, you know, her stroller and looks at me and says, you know, you have to teach her how to swim. I said, Oh my God, we've got another water baby in the family. And I was able to kind of pass that baton on to her as well. And so she's very much there.[00:10:00]
Host Emily Wilson: With not one, but two artist parents, making things was a big part of Alison and her sister's lives.
Artist Alison Saar: My mother, Betty Saar, is a printmaker when I was very young, and I actually would go with her to school a lot. She was getting her graduate degree in printmaking at Long Beach, and so, My early memories were being in the print studio at Long Beach State, and then my father was a ceramicist, a mid century ceramicist, and later a conservator, and so, you know, our first language is definitely a visual language, and we were constantly being fed materials to make stuff just to keep us out of their hair.
My mother's print studio was in the kitchen for the most part. She had a press, probably not the safest environment for young children, but we all survived to keep us occupied and sort of out from underfoot, you know, that was the way she did that. And so much about putting us in front of televisions, but just giving us materials to make things.
And we were encouraged. We used to do like the Renaissance pleasure fair and sell stuff. And you, my mother would have [00:11:00] studio sales and we were always encouraged to put our little painted rocks or whatever silly thing was we were doing as kids. And by we, I mean my sisters and I. I have an older sister, Leslie, and my younger sister, Tracy, and so we were always very actively making art.Now I feel we were really fortunate in that respect.
Host Emily Wilson: Alison likes how Arion's Kindred feels like a sculptural object.
Artist Alison Saar: I'm very tactile. I mean, if people could touch see our conversation, I'm constantly moving my hands and using my hands. And so I kind of naturally gravitated towards sculpture, I think, because I like being able to experience things through touch and through the hand.
And even I think my interest in working with woodcuts or linoleum blocks is that there's a texture and what's beautiful in the beauty of using, uh, press like iron here is that you can actually see. The pressure and the texture that the negative space wells up. And so I love that. And, and the covers actually, it's, you can, you can feel it with your eyes closed.
So that was really lovely to be able to work as opposed to, you know, [00:12:00] very digital process where everything is very flat and doesn't have any sort of depth to it, physical depth to it. It was really lovely to kind of have that again, translated into something that felt really akin to my practice,
Host Emily Wilson: this is the part of the show where I asked the artist the same three questions. I asked Alison when she knew she was an artist and what's some work that made a big impression on her. Usually I ask what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area. But since Alison is in LA, I asked her about LA.
Artist Alison Saar: Ooh, gosh, I guess I never had any understanding of being anything other than an artist. It was. It's always what we did in the home. It's the family business. And so, you know, and actually I tried being a waitress and was hired and fired the same day. So that's, uh, I guess by default, but it [00:13:00] always just felt something that we did naturally.,I didn't think of it as a career and occupation. It's something that we did. Luckily, I was able to make a career out of it, but of
Of course, I’ve been influenced by my mother's work. Cause it's always first thing we see, uh, I think Elizabeth Catlett was really formative in my work. I had the opportunity to meet her once, but that she was just this powerhouse of a woman that was, you know, making these massive wooden sculptures. And I don't know, I just love that sort of force and strength, but also this refined beauty and delicate hand in, in both her sculptures and her prints. And so I would say that her work has really been influential.
The most creatively inspiring place in Los Angeles. Ooh, that's rough. You know, in, in [00:14:00]some ways, the Natural History Museum, when I was growing up, my father worked there as an illustrator in the, um, entomology department. And so it was always this kind of grand, mysterious space because we were always in the, the backgrounds.
We were kind of in, in the underground where they're doing the taxidermy or they're doing this or that and drawers of animals and things like that. And so I think that space, it's somewhere where, you know, when I'm kind of feeling a lull and sort of inspiration, I'd like to go back there and just be in these dark halls and, and ;ook at stuff and I really love that.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you to our guest, Alison Saar. And thank you for listening to Art is Awesome. Please follow the show and join us next time when Suchitra Mattai will be the guest. Talking about her show, She walked in [00:15:00] reverse and found their songs. It's at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco. For the centerpiece, she re imagined her grandparent's house in Guiana, making it out of used saris.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Goto of Goto Productions. It's carried on KSFP LP 102. 5 FM, San Francisco on Fridays at 9 a. m. and 7 p. m. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at ArtisAwesomePodcast or visit our website. Till next [00:16:00]time.