Saar’s art is also currently on view in a number of museum’s permanent collection galleries.
Since 2023, the Huntington in San Marino, California, has exhibited Drifting Toward Twilight, a large-scale commission by the artist. The site-specific installation, which features a 17-foot-long vintage wooden canoe over a bed found objects harvested from the Huntington’s grounds, is inspired by the artist’s visits to the museum and botanical garden as a child. “When I was a child in the 1930s, I would come to The Huntington with my mother and aunt, who were avid gardeners. As I became an artist, I realized the importance, and the influence, of nature in my work—whether it’s the moon and the stars, branches and rocks, or bones and shells,” Saar has said. Drifting Toward Twilight, on view until November 2027, invites the Huntington’s gardens inside, transforming the gallery into a mystical vignette.
On the fourth floor of the Museum of Modern Art in New York is Saar’s Black Girl Window (1969), a defining work from Saar’s early career that sees the artist intermingle the mystical and the political. A worn wooden window frame contains nine otherworldly scenes—images of stars and moons, a daguerreotype, a pair of skeletons—above a phrenological chart, a representation of Leo (Saar’s astrological sign). A figure presses its hands against the glass, eyes wide and vigilant. “Even at the time, I knew it was autobiographical,” Saar has said of the work. “We’d had the Watts Riots and the Black revolution. Also that was the year of my divorce. So in addition to the occult subject matter there was political and also personal content.”
Saar’s sculpture I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break (1996) is also on view at the newly opened David Geffen Galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. An ironing board, an illusion to working-class female labor, diagrams the interior of the British slave ship “Brookes” and depicts how captured Africans were crammed together on the ship’s lower deck. Saar then superimposes a portrait of the racist mammy caricature above the diagram, in a rumination on the history of the transatlantic slave trade as well as its pernicious, gendered legacy.
