It\u2019s a Thursday afternoon in Los Angeles, and I\u2019m walking side by side with Betye Saar, the legendary Angeleno assemblage artist and central figure of the West Coast Black Arts movement. She\u2019s wearing a tonal gray sweater and coordinating pants with flashes of pale blue cheetah print (a perennial favorite of Saar\u2019s) on her shirt and scarf, her silver hair twisted into a soft topknot, her fingers stacked with flea-market jewelry collected over decades. We\u2019re joined by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts and her youngest daughter, Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh.<\/p>\n
We\u2019re at Roberts Projects as Saar does the first walkthrough of \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,\u201d<\/a> a revelatory exhibition opening May 30. Honoring Saar\u2019s 100th birthday this summer, the show gathers more than 200 objects\u2014including costume designs, garments, jewelry, theatrical ephemera, and photographs\u2014to explore a lesser-known but deeply formative period of Saar\u2019s life, reframing those works not as a side note to Saar\u2019s assemblages but as the creative wellspring from which much of her larger practice emerged. (Other celebrations of Saar\u2019s centennial this year include \u201cBetye Saar’s Black Dolls\u201d<\/a> at the New York Historical Society.)<\/p>\n Installation view, \u201cLet\u2019s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,\u201d running from May 30 through August 22, 2026.<\/p>\n <\/span>Photo: Paul Salveson<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n During the years the exhibition spans\u2014the 1950s through the 1970s\u2014Saar was raising her three daughters Lezley, Alison, and Tracye in Laurel Canyon while designing costumes for productions at Los Angeles\u2019s groundbreaking Inner City Cultural Center. At the same time, she was teaching, making greeting cards and enamel objects for extra income, and sewing clothing for friends and family. \u201cI never considered myself an artist [then],\u201d Saar tells me later that afternoon, \u201calways as a designer.\u201d Yet she was slowly developing the visual language that would eventually transform contemporary assemblage.<\/p>\n Saar doesn\u2019t move through the show with the heaviness of someone revisiting old glories. Instead, she repeatedly stops short in front of enlarged production photographs and costume renderings from decades earlier, letting out delighted little gasps as she recognizes a face, a fabric, a performer, a memory. \u201cOhhhh!\u201d she says at one point, visibly thrilled by the scale of a blown-up stage image.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m the kind of person that lives the moment and then I move on,\u201d she tells me. \u201cSo I said, \u2018Oh yeah, that was fun to make.\u2019 And then to see it blown up, I said, \u2018Oh boy, that\u2019s fun!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Born in Los Angeles in 1926, Saar was only five years old when her father died, prompting her mother to move the family into her paternal grandmother\u2019s home in Watts. On walks through the neighborhood, Saar regularly passed Simon Rodia\u2019s Watts Towers<\/a>, seeing firsthand how discarded materials could be transformed into something monumental, even magical. \u201cI was a person that never threw away anything,\u201d Saar tells me with a giggle. \u201cEven as a kid, my mother would say, \u2018You\u2019ve got to clean up your room.\u2019 I would just hide things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"Image](\"https:\/\/assets.vogue.com\/photos\/6a172c4a51c78a16e130245d\/master\/w_1600%2Cc_limit\/Saar_Let'sGetItOn_InstallationView1_CourtesyoftheartistandRobertsProjects%2CLosAngeles%2CCalifornia_PhotoPaulSalveson.jpg\"\/)
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