Solo presentation of washboard assemblage sculptures by Betye Saar opens in Los Angeles
(Artdaily.org)

The Craft & Folk Art Museum presents Betye Saar: Keepin’ It Clean, a solo presentation of the seminal contemporary artist’s washboard assemblage sculptures, which she began in the late 1990s and continues to make to this day. Born in 1926, Saar is a prolific artist and iconic figure of the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s, whose complex assemblage sculptures address race, memory, and Black consciousness. Curated in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition presents twenty-four new and historic works that center the washboard as a symbol of the unresolved legacy of slavery and the subsequent oppressive systems facing Black Americans today, particularly Black women. Saar’s renewed focus on making washboard assemblages stands as an urgent act of cleansing the race- and gender-based violence that American