Family Legacies: Race, Gender, and Inheritance in the Art of Betye and Alison Saar

Contemporary mother and daughter artists Betye and Alison Saar provide a unique model of a family legacy within art's histories: one that hinges around a family of women artists. Because they represent different generations of three intertwined legacies-a family artistic legacy, a feminist legacy, and an African American cultural legacy-their work calls for a broad scope of analysis that questions the ramifications of cross-culturalism in terms of the politics of race and gender. This project uncovers how the racial, gendered, and familial components of the Saars' art merge with the metaphysical to affect issues of political agency. Chapter 1 discusses Betye Saar's negotiations within the 1970s feminist and black arts movements and her influence on Alison, especially with respect to the burgeoning interest in the historical development of the black female nude. Betye's self-positioning reveals the historical trajectory of racism within (white) feminism, and the varying ideological allegiances black women have felt toward cultural and feminist groups. Betye's experiences also provide a means of contextualizing Alison's contemporary feminist consciousness. Chapter 2 draws from recent scholarship about history and memory to examine how Betye and Alison interrogate ethnic identity through their depictions of stereotypes. I show that Betye's early imagery overtly responds to the politically allied black artists groups and civil rights protests of the 1960s and 1970s, while Alison's art is also directly linked to contemporary identity politics. Chapter 3 lays the foundations for a matrilineal narrative of art history. I argue that the Saars, as a family collaborating with each other, are the inheritors of the 1970s feminist tradition of a metaphorical "family" of women artists, but are also part of an occluded historical phenomenon of women being mentored and taught by, or members of a network of, women artists. Central to my analysis is the controversial model of the mother's body as a line of creativity, which has been theorized differently by black and white feminist writing.