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 spont...