The New Hampshire Institute of Art’s Sharon Arts Center, together with the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery of New York, are hosting an exhibition of the work of Betye Saar, recipient of the 55th Edward MacDowell Medal. (Saar received the award on August 10.) The exhibition, composed of mixed media assemblages and collages, will be featured in the SAC window from August 1 through August 25.
The window-space exhibition focuses on Saar’s most recent body of work, her “Cage” series. Throughout her career, Saar has been collecting ordinary household items, including various types of cages, from flea markets, yard sales and antique shops. Recently, these cages are used to represent physical and metaphorical incarceration as well as resilience and survival. The works in this exhibition continue Saar’s overall body of work—a global perspective interlaced with the artist’s personal interest in metaphysics, magic, mystery, legends and superstitions.
The first artist residency program in the United States, the MacDowell Colony was founded in 1907 by composer Edward MacDowell and his wife Marian. Since 1960, the Colony has awarded the Edward MacDowell medal annually to individual artists making outstanding contributions to their fields. In 1997, The MacDowell Colony was honored with the National Medal of Arts — the highest award given by the United States to artists or arts patrons — for “nurturing and inspiring many of this century’s finest artists” and offering them “the opportunity to work within a dynamic community of their peers, where creative excellence is the standard.”
Saar, who started as a printmaker, is perhaps best known for her intimate assemblages and collages, which not only challenge the myths and negative stereotypes ascribed to the African-American community but also demonstrate a connection with a myriad of mythic and spiritual concepts from Africa and the Caribbean. The artist, who eventually moved into working with found objects in larger-scale installations, joins an impressive list of past Medal recipients, including Robert Frost (1962), Georgia O’Keeffe (1972), Leonard Bernstein (1987), Jasper Johns (1994), I.M. Pei (1998), Ellsworth Kelly (1999), and Stephen Sondheim (2013).
Saar has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Getty Foundation. Her work is represented in the collections of the Detroit Institute of the Arts, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Studio Museum in Harlem, and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. At age 88, Saar resides and continues to make work in her Los Angeles studio.
MacDowell Colony chair and author Michael Chabon, who will present the medal, said, “Betye Saar uses shards of myth and narrative, and found bits of history — with all its pain and magnificence — to build scale models of a world that is intensely personal and yet instantly, inescapably recognizable as our own broken world. These scale models of brokenness help us to interpret and find meaning in that world, mapping it with fierceness, a sense of play, and the wild accuracy you find among the great cartographers and world-builders, also known as artists, whose explorations the MacDowell Colony has for so long striven to foster and sustain.”
Gallery hours are: Monday–Saturday: 10 am–6 pm and Sunday from 11 am–4 pm. For more information contact the Sharon Arts Center at 603.924.7256 or visit www.sharonarts.org.
Current Issue - May 2024