Biography
Alison Saar was born in Los Angeles in 1956 to a ceramist and art restorer father and an artist mother, Betye Saar. She is a graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California and the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, where she lives and works.
Over the last forty years, she has built up a rich body of work that is still little known in Europe, made up of sculptures and installations at the crossroads of various cultural influences (Afro-American culture, Caribbean folklore and spirituality, mythology and art brut) and centred essentially on the identity of black women in the United States.
Saar has also developed a unique printmaking practice, experimenting with woodcut, silkscreen, linocut and lithography. Echoing her sculptural practice, which incorporates numerous found objects, her prints are sometimes printed on different media – jute sacks, old handkerchiefs and tea towels, etc. – and enriched by collage and chine collé techniques, revealing a surprising material intensity.
Saar's work has been exhibited in prestigious American museums, and can be found in the collections of MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington) and the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra).
Several of her sculptures have been installed in public spaces in the United States, and in 2024 the work Salon was inaugurated in the Aznavour garden in Paris to coincide with the Olympic Games.
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