Alison Saar

Alison Saar is a sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist based in Los Angelos. Saar’s parents, her mother an acclaimed collagist and her father a painter and art conservator, nurtured Saar’s interest in art. Assisting in her father’s restoration shop inspired her curiosity about art, other cultures, and spiritual traditions. 

Saar’s creative style incorporates found objects such as rough-hewn wood, old tin ceiling panels, nails, shards of pottery, glass, and urban detritus. The resulting figures and shapes explore issues of gender, race, heritage, history, and race. Her artwork is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American folk art, myth, and spirituality and focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. 

Saar’s lithographs, etchings, and woodblock prints are evocations of her other works, powerful depictions of figures carved from wood or etched in metal and articulated with found objects with a narrative all their own. She undertakes printmaking with the same tangible approach to unconventional materials and methods. Saar will often experiment with repurposing worn fabrics she has collected over time for printmaking, embracing the tears and stains as evidence of use.

Saar earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Studio Art and Art History in 1978 from Scripps College in Claremont, California. In 1981, she earned her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, California. Her work is part of private collections and museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY.