An Interview with Alison Saar
By Suh Won Chang, Claremont McKenna'21
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Alison Saar, Scripps ’78, is an artist based in Los Angeles. Her work in sculpture, printmaking, and other multimedia art makes use of distinctive materials in order to touch upon topics of Black female identity, mythology, and alchemy. Her exhibitions Mirror, Mirror and Of Aether and Earthe are featured this fall at Scripps College and Pomona College respectively.
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Are you in your studio right now?
Yes, this is my print studio. I have a plank behind me, and… mostly junk. This seems to be the dumping ground for everyone in the family. They just dump all their stuff in here, so…
And then you make them into art pieces.
Yeah! (laughs)
How did your time at Scripps influence your artwork and how you came to view art?
Well, I grew up around artists—both my mother and father are artists—so I was always involved with the arts from early on. But when I got to Scripps, I worked with Dr. Samella Lewis studying art history. She was actually a doctor on the art of China, but she is African-American, so I took African-American, African, and Afro-Caribbean art classes with her. That really influenced a lot of the themes of my work. Another big influence was the core curriculum at Scripps, which looked at world history through arts. I was really influenced by Greek mythology and Greek literature.
As in your upcoming exhibition, Of Aether and Earthe.
Right. A lot of my works are related to mythology. The title of that exhibition is spelled the way it would have been spelled in alchemic writing, so it’s got a lot of e’s and a’s and r’s and th’s. I like the idea of making art as a sort of alchemy, that you take some base materials and then you transform them into something that’s meaningful or spiritual.
Do you have a preference for the kind of base materials you use?
I mostly end up using whatever is lying around. Materials like found wood, or found ceiling tile, or tar. Things like that, which are really worthless in their own right. When combined and put into these forms, they sort of become valuable in another way. I like that idea of transmuting something to another.
Have you always worked with a variety of media, or did you have a breakthrough moment when you decided to change your style?
Because my mother did a lot of assemblages, we were always going to state sales and flea markets. We were always fascinated with used and older materials. Also, where we grew up, in Laurel Canyon, just north of Hollywood—that’s where I live now—was an area that had been decimated by wildfires in 1958. So when we grew up here, we were surrounded by burnt-down houses and I would find all these cool little melted pieces of glass, things like that. You find something like an old, melted horse, and you get to wondering who it belonged to. I got really interested in the history of objects in that respect.
But I guess my epiphany moment was becoming a sculptor. Even though Scripps had a great ceramics department and a great sculpture department, I never took any of those classes. It wasn’t until my last semester that I started making sculpture. I made two sculptures, and I never went back.
Since you brought up sculptures, I was curious about the extensive use of female bodies in your work. What kind of message do you want to convey to viewers by portraying both the fluid and the grounded elements in a female body, when the conventional manner of thinking tends to relate fluidity to women and groundedness to men?
In my early work I did some male figures every once in a while—I have a son, and he’s reflected in my work whenever I’m frustrated with him. (laughs) I guess I really became interested in the female body because one, I am a female, and two, I think it became a real focus of my work after I had my children. Pregnancy is a kind of alchemy, the magic of childbirth and all of that.
But historically, female bodies have always been portrayed in certain ways, and usually by males. That lends a very different way of looking at the female body, of portraying and presenting them. I grew up in a family with very strong, powerful women. My mother and my grandmother are both survivors. Just to see the strength of them holding families together, and working, and surviving their spouses, and just being real powerhouses... so instead of the way women are always on the fainting couch or being raped or being subservient, I was really interested in portraying women that are closer to the way I identify and the women that I have known in my life, and so many of the powerful women out there in the world as well.
Even though I look like I’m white, I identify as African American and by race; my mother is African American. In our upbringing, my mother was very much involved in the Black Arts Movement and very militant in her work during the Civil Rights Movement. That was what I was weaned on. So then I wanted to focus on the Black female body, the history of what the Black female body has experienced, and what Black female bodies are experiencing here and now in terms of the media and all sorts of… you know. It’s all still pretty twisted.
Yes, this is my print studio. I have a plank behind me, and… mostly junk. This seems to be the dumping ground for everyone in the family. They just dump all their stuff in here, so…
And then you make them into art pieces.
Yeah! (laughs)
How did your time at Scripps influence your artwork and how you came to view art?
Well, I grew up around artists—both my mother and father are artists—so I was always involved with the arts from early on. But when I got to Scripps, I worked with Dr. Samella Lewis studying art history. She was actually a doctor on the art of China, but she is African-American, so I took African-American, African, and Afro-Caribbean art classes with her. That really influenced a lot of the themes of my work. Another big influence was the core curriculum at Scripps, which looked at world history through arts. I was really influenced by Greek mythology and Greek literature.
As in your upcoming exhibition, Of Aether and Earthe.
Right. A lot of my works are related to mythology. The title of that exhibition is spelled the way it would have been spelled in alchemic writing, so it’s got a lot of e’s and a’s and r’s and th’s. I like the idea of making art as a sort of alchemy, that you take some base materials and then you transform them into something that’s meaningful or spiritual.
Do you have a preference for the kind of base materials you use?
I mostly end up using whatever is lying around. Materials like found wood, or found ceiling tile, or tar. Things like that, which are really worthless in their own right. When combined and put into these forms, they sort of become valuable in another way. I like that idea of transmuting something to another.
Have you always worked with a variety of media, or did you have a breakthrough moment when you decided to change your style?
Because my mother did a lot of assemblages, we were always going to state sales and flea markets. We were always fascinated with used and older materials. Also, where we grew up, in Laurel Canyon, just north of Hollywood—that’s where I live now—was an area that had been decimated by wildfires in 1958. So when we grew up here, we were surrounded by burnt-down houses and I would find all these cool little melted pieces of glass, things like that. You find something like an old, melted horse, and you get to wondering who it belonged to. I got really interested in the history of objects in that respect.
But I guess my epiphany moment was becoming a sculptor. Even though Scripps had a great ceramics department and a great sculpture department, I never took any of those classes. It wasn’t until my last semester that I started making sculpture. I made two sculptures, and I never went back.
Since you brought up sculptures, I was curious about the extensive use of female bodies in your work. What kind of message do you want to convey to viewers by portraying both the fluid and the grounded elements in a female body, when the conventional manner of thinking tends to relate fluidity to women and groundedness to men?
In my early work I did some male figures every once in a while—I have a son, and he’s reflected in my work whenever I’m frustrated with him. (laughs) I guess I really became interested in the female body because one, I am a female, and two, I think it became a real focus of my work after I had my children. Pregnancy is a kind of alchemy, the magic of childbirth and all of that.
But historically, female bodies have always been portrayed in certain ways, and usually by males. That lends a very different way of looking at the female body, of portraying and presenting them. I grew up in a family with very strong, powerful women. My mother and my grandmother are both survivors. Just to see the strength of them holding families together, and working, and surviving their spouses, and just being real powerhouses... so instead of the way women are always on the fainting couch or being raped or being subservient, I was really interested in portraying women that are closer to the way I identify and the women that I have known in my life, and so many of the powerful women out there in the world as well.
Even though I look like I’m white, I identify as African American and by race; my mother is African American. In our upbringing, my mother was very much involved in the Black Arts Movement and very militant in her work during the Civil Rights Movement. That was what I was weaned on. So then I wanted to focus on the Black female body, the history of what the Black female body has experienced, and what Black female bodies are experiencing here and now in terms of the media and all sorts of… you know. It’s all still pretty twisted.