In 1972, Betye Saar, who has died aged 99, was invited to take part in a group exhibition of Black artists at the Rainbow Sign community centre in Berkeley, California. In selecting what to show, Saar reached for a figurine of Aunt Jemima from her collection of kitschy trinkets. She placed the mop-carrying breakfast brand character in a glass-fronted box, invoking a religious icon, and added a toy rifle to the other hand. “My intent was to transform a negative, demeaning figure into a positive, empowered woman … a warrior ready to combat servitude and racism,” Saar said. The impact of the Liberation of Aunt Jemima was such that the activist Angela Davis credited it as instrumental in launching the fight for Black female power.
More works appropriating racist imagery followed in the same year, each equally visceral. The three-panelled Let Me Entertain You features a Black minstrel playing a banjo, while the second picture shows the same figure superimposed over imagery of lynchings. In the third panel a Black figure holds a gun in the same way as the musical instrument. For I’ve Got Rhythm, Saar took a mechanical metronome in a wooden case and attached a plastic toy skeleton to the needle. On the inside of the instrument’s lid she stuck a newspaper cutting that reads: “Lynched after refusing to dance on white’s command.”
