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The feminist movement has given me more professional exposure. But I resist that now, just like I resist exhibiting in African American artists' shows. I've always worked the same way, and haven't done anything I would consider "feminist art."
-Betye Saar
Yes, I am a feminist. I was involved with the Women's Space [Womanspace] here in Los Angeles. Feminism for me implies more like humanism, just accepting yourself and knowing that it's okay to be the way you are.... For me the ultimate goal is to be a whole person and to accept the outcome.
-Betve Saar
People aren't really ready to deal with fierce female passion.
-Alison Saar
Betye Saar considers herself a feminist; however she resists designating her artwork as such. Similarly, Alison Saar, Betye's daughter, avoids labeling her own art as feminist.' Yet, both artists have helped to shape a feminist consciousness in the arts since the early 19705 through their probing constructions of autobiography, self-identity, family, and the female body: a consciousness circulating around the historical development of the African American female nude. Betye's early ideas of spirituality and ethnicity, shaped in the early 19705, have germinated within her daughter, evidenced by Alison's bust- and full-length nude, nonwhite female figures of the 19805 and 19903. The Saars' intergenerational explorations of race, history, and the black female body represent a crucial step to reclaim the contentious history surrounding the visual representation of African American women.
Contemporary scholarship often distinguishes Betye's era as the beginning of a reclamation project that has continued to flourish in the art of Alison and her contemporaries. Alison's sculptures reflect her mother's experiences and ideas, but they also form part of a continual, adaptive development of African American representations of the female nude that artists began in the first half of the twentieth century. Negotiations between the binaries of race and gender occurred in the arts much earlier than the 1960s and 1970s, the period when these issues received such great attention. Artists such as Eldzier Cortor and Rose Piper produced images during the 1940s that illuminate the constant contemporary problems related to women's control over their own bodies within social, racial, and sexual milieux. Thus, as a means of filling a missing link, this essay examines the...