Betye Saar's Visions of Reality, Altered

In 1994, while attending an artist residency at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in northern Italy, Betye Saar experimented with using a Polaroid camera as an artist’s tool in tandem with her skills in printmaking, collage and design. Photographing everything from gardens and native flora to the plethora of objects and architectural details in the villas throughout town, Saar began creating what she referred to as “altered Polaroids:” striking photographic compositions on a miniature scale that synthesized core elements of her practice while evolving towards something bigger. Following her finely-honed intuition, Saar would “alter” the photographs by scratching, drawing and pressing into the surface of the images developed, producing unique and unexpected results. She then pasted the altered Polaroids into the pages of her sketchbooks and collages, further augmenting them with ink and watercolor paint. Comprising ten mix-media wall assemblages created over almost as many years, this little-known series of work reveals a psychospiritual depth that is testament to both Saar’s mastery of her craft and the enduring power of her practice.

Saar’s experiments with altered Polaroids coincided with a renewed interest in the forms of “Tantric art,” a visual language derived from Hinduism that is characterized by symmetrical compositions of geometric shapes and lines rendered with a limited color palette. Tantric art was formally established as an academic discipline in the mid-20th century by renowned South Asian author and curator Ajit Mookerjee, whose seminal text Tantric Art: Its Philosophy and Physics is credited by Saar for first cultivating her interest in the genre. The philosophy of Tantric art and its previous influence on Saar’s practice is evident in works from her earlier series of altar assemblages such as Sadhana (1974), named for a Sanskrit term that describes a disciplined spiritual practice in pursuit of enlightenment. This connection is further cemented in the homophone of “alter” and “altar,” a deliberate act of wordplay that Saar uses to inscribe her experiment with divine, holy purpose. In documents from her studio archives, Saar articulates the principles of Tantric art that have significantly impacted her practice and catalyzed her experiments with altered Polaroids: