The current exhibit at the David C. Driskell Center is titled STILL... featuring the artist Alison Saar and her 11 sculptures. Her work is held in many collections including the Museum of Modern Art, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and Metropolitan Museum of Art; and she has major public art works in Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. She has received numerous awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Anonymous Was a Woman, and the National Endowment for the Arts. This particular exhibit has already traveled to the Figge Art Museum, and will later travel to Bakalar & Paine Galleries, MassArt in Massachusetts.
But for now, the exhibit can be seen at the Driskell Center Gallery which is free and open to the public from Monday to Friday at 11:00am to 4:00pm with extended hours on Wednesday until 6:00pm. The opening of this exciting new exhibit took place on Thursday, September 12, 2013 featuring a gallery tour by the artist and will stay on display until Friday, December 13, 2013. Through her large scale sculptures, Saar references her multiracial background by sending powerful messages scrutinizing racism as well as placing a large emphasis on the balance between civilization and wilderness.
Scrutiny of racism is clearly displayed in her piece, one of my favorites, titled Weight which depicts a graphite girl on a cotton balance, with tools of labor on the opposite side. The figure is being equated with the labor options available for women of color in the past, which is a direct reference to slavery. Saar’s use of very unique materials was absolutely breathtaking, and my favorite part of her sculptures. She contrasts rustic and mechanical materials such as tools and copper with the lighter materials that she used such as wood, rice paper, and glass. Various materials can be seen especially in her interactive sculptures, such as Mammy Machine which includes blown glass breasts in different shades of brown hanging from a copper armature. Attached is a rubber pump that the observer can squeeze to cause “milk” to come from the glass breasts, which encompasses the stereotype of black women in the past to only be seen as nannies and nurses.
Her large floor-to-ceiling sculptures create a fantastic visual and kinetic tension such as En Pointe in which the antlers on this human-animal hybrid are just scraping the floor. These hybrids that she creates emphasize the dangling between wilderness and humanity, the figure caught balancing between the two. The powerful images of anti-bigotry and Saar’s use of material to express herself creates an exhibit which any art or history enthusiast would appreciate.
