Colony Little, Culture Shock Art

The show revolves around a series of washboard assemblages Saar exhibited in a 1998 show called Workers and Warriors at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York.  The vintage washboards, made from wood and metal are combined with other found materials including clocks, weathered bars of lye soap made from animal fat, and various forms of detritus including photos and snippets of prose. The central figure in the majority of the assemblages is Aunt Jemima, the caricature turned warrior in Saar’s seminal 1972 piece called “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima”.  History has shown the power of iconography to plant the seeds of dehumanization that perpetuated genocide, massacres and institutional racism. By recontextualizing harmful iconography, Saar plants new seeds of redemption and empowerment. As Kellie Jones observed in her book South of Pico, “we can also consider Saar’s recycling and reinvention of contemptible collectibles as part of a broader act of wide-ranging cultural restructuring and redefinition.”

As much as Saar’s 1998 Workers and Warriors show harkened back to 1972 under the guise of “Unfinished Business”, Saar’s work in Keepin’ It Clean reminds viewers that there’s more unfinished business. In addition to the washboards created in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Saar has created 6 new works between 2015 and 2017 that address the current fragility of the black male body under the ever-present specter of police brutality. In the works on display her use of repetition in content and phraseology remind us that the pathology behind racism not only recurs, but it has taken on new form.  However, out of these tragedies black women have mobilized in response to them.

“Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines”

Much of Saar’s work is an homage to the life journeys of black women and the special way black women transform challenges into opportunities for growth. The washboard theme is not only self referential (Saar’s mother Beatrice worked as a laundress while she attended UCLA), but it is historical. The prevalence of laundresses traces back to post war reconstruction where black women continued to toil under exploitative, harsh working conditions in communal laundries and within their own homes. The exhibition’s catalog notes that between 1890-1910 two-thirds of laundry workers were black women.  Within this bleak environmental and economic context, black women reframed these conditions to create opportunities to assert their rights and create affirming spaces. Under reconstruction laundresses were contract workers who did not live in their employer’s homes. This sliver of freedom gave women the space to form loose networks in communal spaces which became incubators for community building.