I play a game when I'm in a gallery or museum. I imagine the fire alarm has sounded and I must choose one item to rescue.
As soon as I saw Alison Saar's "Scorch Song" during a visit to the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, I knew the game was over that day.
The three-foot tall statue was lovely and haunting. Saar had carved the figure of a woman from wood reddened with pigment, then embellished it with a skirt fashioned from miniature cast-iron skillets dangling from a chain.
The chain evoked slavery and the title spoke to trauma. But the woman was depicted in the forthright stance of the kind of traditional Congolese sculpture that serves to connect people to their ancestors and the wisdom of the past. And she holds one of the skillets, which generations of women have used to prepare food for their families, in her left hand as if it were the Statue of Liberty's beacon, pointing us to the future. Or a weapon to wield in self-defense.
Until that day in Washington I'd only stood before Saar's large public art pieces. While I had seen photographs of her paintings, prints and smaller statues, I had not been in a room with Saar piece compact enough for me to cart away in case of emergency.
Saar is a visual storyteller, which appeals to me as a journalist. She is known for her depictions of powerful women. She layers her work with familiar objects she has salvaged -- skillets, nails, broken pottery, linoleum strips, tin ceiling tiles, wash tubs, soap -- that help her connect with viewers the way writers connect with readers.
At the 2020 launch of a book-length survey of her career, Saar said in a video recording of the event, "I think the way an artist's mind works and a poet's mind works are very similar, in terms of pulling some often disparate images and ideas and putting them together, and they're kind of taking you by the hand and leading you in or out of the darkness. Leading you into things to discover.
"Because I use a lot of found objects and materials, it feels almost the way, I think, writers in general work with words. Words have histories the way objects have histories, and you can kind of play off of those histories and different meanings."
One of her bodies of work was inspired by a story, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 abolitionist novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin." In a series of paintings on indigo-dyed seed sacks and vintage linen and cotton and sculptures, Saar resisted the way popular media ridiculed Topsy, a mischievous slave girl who in the novel is a foil to the angelic daughter of an enslaver.
Saar has depicted Topsy over the years in a variety of media. For one of the pieces, she created five child-sized statues of Topsy, ready to rescue or to rise up. Each of the figures, carved from wood and plated with tin, is armed with a tool slaves had used -- a machete for sugar cane, a knife for tobacco, a hoe for indigo, a sickle for rice and a bale hook for cotton. It was the artist’s response to the contemporary killings by law enforcement officers of Black Americans such as Philando Castile. Saar heard on the news recordings made in the immediate aftermath of Castile's 2016 death in which the four-year-old daughter of his girlfriend tried to calm her mother. The child feared her mother, too, would be shot.
Saar, speaking about her Topsy work for a video produced by her gallery L.A. Louver in 2018, said she felt it was "time for the tables to turn and to kind of push back."
Saar was born in Los Angeles. She earned a bachelor's in fine arts and art history from Scripps College, where her studies included African art, and an MFA from the Otis College of Art and Design. Her art education began well before college as the daughter of Betye Saar, herself a celebrated artist who died in 2025, and Richard Saar, also an artist, who died in 2004.
As a child, Saar spent time in both her mother's printmaking and her father's ceramics studios, and her mother took her to see the Watts Towers on a lot in South Central Los Angeles. Betye Saar had visited the towers as a child with her grandmother. Alison Saar would later say that seeing the towers that Sabato Rodia, a construction worker who had immigrated from Italy, fashioned from concrete, tile, and found objects taught her that "art could be made of anything and by anyone, anywhere."
A Los Angeles gallery hosted Saar's first solo show before she turned 30. She has exhibited across the United States and in Senegal. The Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among the institutions that have her work in their collections.
In the 1990s, Saar was taking her work outside galleries. She replaced the bed of a 1959 Chevy pickup with a tin-roofed shed holding a six-foot wooden catfish sculpture, inspired by Baltimore's traditional African-American fish and produce hawkers. She drove the piece she called "Catfish Dreamin'" to various sites across the Mid-Atlantic. Once parked, she would pull piled stones on which the word "dream" was written from the fish's mouth and handed them out to anyone who shared a story, a song, a memory with her.
Her vision, she wrote when "Catfish Dreamin'" was temporarily installed in Pasadena, California in 2021, was "to democratize art viewing, to recognize art not as something you have to go and see in a museum, but something you can experience directly."
Saar called "Catfish Dreamin'" her first piece of public art. Her more conventional public art commissions include 1994’s 15-foot-tall "Monument to the Great Northern Migration," which stands on a street corner on the South Side of Chicago. It honors the millions of African Americans who fled violence and discrimination in the South from the 1910s to the 1970s. The bronze figure of a man carries a tattered suitcase secured with twine and is surrounded by a circle of suitcases made of terra cotta, a reminder of the masonry and other skills African Americans brought with them to Chicago and other northern cities.
Her "Swing Low," a larger-than-life bronze of Harriet Tubman, was the first public monument in New York City dedicated to an African American woman when it was unveiled in 2007. The statue stands on a Harlem street corner facing south, as if Tubman is headed on a rescue mission. Saar had clad the Chicago Great Migration monument in what looks like worn-out soles of shoes, symbolizing the difficulty of the journey north; she scattered on Tubman's flowing skirt motifs of chains and the faces, some depicted as West African masks, of those led to freedom.
In her native Los Angeles, Saar's 12-foot "Embodied" has presided over the Hall of Justice, which houses county courts, since 2014. In an artist statement, Saar wrote that her woman with a dove taking off from one hand and in the other a book "weighs and balances the book of the law and equates it to freedom and peace."
In Paris, for an International Olympic Committee commission for the 2024 games, Saar depicted a Black woman with a golden flame in one hand and olive branches in the other, positioned among public seating – reminiscent of the circle of terra cotta suitcases in Chicago -- that includes bronze versions of a West African stool and a European bent-wood chair.
The flame reappeared in the hand of another Saar bronze, a woman tall as a tree on the grounds of the Obama Presidential Center, which opened in 2026 in Chicago. Called "Torch Song," it is, unlike 2022’s "Scorch Song," unambiguously optimistic, celebrating the voices of Black women such as Marian Anderson and Nina Simone who have used art to champion justice. Piano keys are draped like a bandolier over the chest.
In an essay for a catalog of highlights from the collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Saar wrote that she used the skillets of “Scorch Song” to evoke the magic girdle that in the Western classical myth gave an Amazon warrior her power. While in the myth the Amazon Hippolyta is killed and Hercules takes her belt, Saar’s woman is formidable. Saar wrote that in addition to the mythological reference, the figure reimagined Josephine Baker's "infamous banana skirt" as “armor to thwart unwanted advances and a barrier to any misdirected gaze."
Saar wouldn’t mind that I read a different story in “Scorch Song,” and not just because I’m ready to rescue it.
Saar said in an interview recorded for the Smithsonian in 2024 that "the most powerful works are the works that do not dictate what they're about.
“I'm hoping that people will come with a curiosity and try to piece together what these different components mean and allow them to create a narrative in their own minds."
