Betye Saar's Last Costume Change

 Walk into Roberts Projects on South La Brea Avenue this month and the space feels less like a gallery than a costume shop caught mid-shift. Mannequins wear Renaissance Faire bodices and 1969 stage garments; sketches for a production of "West Side Story" hang beside contact sheets of actors mid-rehearsal. "Let's Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar" opened May 30 as a survey of a part of her career almost nobody had seen, and it closes August 22. In between, on July 26, Saar died in her sleep at her Los Angeles home, four days short of her 100th birthday.

Portrait of Betye Saar


The premise sounds like a footnote: more than two hundred garments, sketches, and photographs from a fine artist's day job as a costumer. But it reframes two of the most anthologized works in postwar American art. "Black Girl's Window" (1969) and "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima" (1972), both built from staged tableaux of found objects, look less like spontaneous assemblage and more like theater sets Saar had already spent a decade building for other people's stories.


Saar began designing costumes in 1968 for the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater founded after the 1965 Watts uprising, dressing productions of "West Side Story," "Antigone," and "Burlesque Is Alive." At the same time she sewed for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire, an annual costumed market north of Los Angeles, from 1964 to 1973. She was in her late thirties and forties, raising three daughters, years from the recognition that would eventually put her work in the Museum of Modern Art. "I liked a certain kind of theatrical feeling," she said of how the stagecraft carried into her installations.



Betye Saar (born 1926, U.S.), The Differences Between, 1989.


Roberts Projects has represented Saar for decades, and the bond runs deeper than a roster listing. When the gallery converted a 1948 former Chrysler-Plymouth showroom on La Brea Avenue into its current 10,000-square-foot space in 2023, it built a permanent site-specific installation by Saar into the architecture itself. She is not a visiting name in this building. She is embedded in it, which makes the timing of this particular show harder to read as pure coincidence.


There's a market question sitting under the curatorial one. La Brea Avenue has become an axis of the new LA gallery map, with Pace and Sean Kelly opening nearby as the city's blue-chip gravity shifted from Culver City toward Mid-City real estate. Saar's major assemblage works are already locked into museum collections, which means a 200-object trove of unseen garments and sketches functions, among other things, as new inventory, surfacing just as demand for her work is certain to climb. The Betye Saar Legacy Group, a body of scholars and curators she handpicked in 2025, now decides what comes next and when.


A companion catalogue accompanied the show, with essays and an interview conducted by actor CCH Pounder. Roberts Projects held its launch and signing on July 25, 2026. Saar died early the next morning, in her sleep, four days before the birthday everyone around her had been quietly counting toward. Public accounts of that evening don't say whether she was there.


The Betye Saar Legacy Group has not said whether "Let's Get It On" will travel after August 22, or whether any of its 200-plus objects will land in museum collections rather than stay saleable. Who gets to decide which parts of a finished life still count as minor?

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A NAME FOUND INSIDE A SCRIBBLE NOBODY HAD READ YET

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  The room had been excavated in 2010 by the National Geographic Explorer William Saturno. Sixteen years later, someone was still staring at one faint patch of paint on its east wall, trying to work out what it said. The building is a small masonry structure at Xultun, a Maya site in the jungle of northeastern Guatemala, 340 kilometers southwest of Guatemala City. Its interior walls are covered with portraits of seated and kneeling men, each labeled with the title taaj — "obsidian," a term for a class of scribes and scholars — and with more than fifty faint mathematical notations scattered across the plaster like a scratch pad nobody bothered to erase. One cluster, designated Text 19, sat below a larger, already-deciphered inscription: eleven small hieroglyphs, ten centimeters tall in total, easy to miss even for people who had been staring at this room for years. The Met, Public Domain — Chakalte', "Relief with enthroned ruler" (770 CE), Maya, La Pasadita, Guat...
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THE PAINTING THAT HUNG UNDER THE WRONG NAME FOR A CENTURY

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  For most of the twentieth century, a Jesuit residence in Dublin had a dark, dramatic painting of a betrayal hanging quietly in its dining hall. The priests who ate beneath it believed it was the work of a minor Dutch follower of a more famous Italian master. It hung there through decades of dinners, unremarkable, misattributed, until a restorer finally looked closely enough in 1990 to recognize what it actually was: a lost original by Caravaggio himself, "The Taking of Christ," painted around 1602 and missing from the historical record for nearly two hundred years. That kind of disappearance was not unusual for him. Caravaggio was, by multiple accounts, the most electrifying Italian painter to work since Michelangelo — whom he was not related to, though he shared the name — and he was almost completely forgotten within years of his own death. Paintings were quietly reassigned to other artists' catalogues. His name barely survived the century he died in, and it would tak...
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The Silence and the Sales Curve: Lee Bae's Charcoal Enters a Cistercian Abbey

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  Paris, around 1990. Lee Bae, a painter newly arrived from Cheongdo, South Korea, has no money for oil paint or canvas. Rent alone strains what little he has. He needs a material he can afford, and at a modest shop — by most accounts a gas station or a neighborhood supermarket — he finds an inexpensive bag of ordinary barbecue charcoal, the kind sold for grilling, not for art. He buys it anyway. Nothing about the material asks to be looked at — it is fuel, ash-black and cheap. But he opens the bag, turns a lump over in his hand, and does not put it down. That small act of thrift, a poor painter buying what he could afford instead of what he wanted, becomes, over the following decades, one of the more improbable turns in contemporary art. Charcoal is wood that has already died once — burned, blackened, reduced — yet it does not simply end there. Lee Bae found in it a material that had passed through fire and come out the other side, still capable of holding form, still capable of b...
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