| Lezley Saar |
| Africans, Tragic Mulattos, Anomalies and Rap Essay by Barbara Bloemink |
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High Yellow, House Nigger, Pinky - Uppity Integration -
Assimilation |
Lezley Saar’s mixed media paintings evoke other worlds, emotions, and paradigms. While much of her work harkens to the past for inspiration, its’ commentary is focused on contemporary culture. Her works reward extended viewing, and only reveal their true meanings over time. Unlike so much contemporary art, Saar’s paintings cannot be scanned quickly: the messages carried within their mixed media surfaces require gradual excavation and thought.
This rejection of rapid judgment, in both style and subject matter, is a metaphor that persists throughout Saar’s work. In her Anomalies series, for example, Saar explores the psychology of
appearance, visualizing what being a misfit or an outsider meant in the past. The images she chooses are initially disconcerting, but progressively reveal their beauty — Margaret Clark with her conjoined twin protruding from her stomach, black and white Siamese twins, a woman dressed as an Arab boy — all figures formerly relegated to circus sideshows. By calling attention to these figures through the detailed elaboration of their portraits, Saar reminds thoughtful viewers of the complexities of life, and what is missed by dismissing a person or an image too quickly.In Reality Rap, Saar turns this idea to a consideration of the rap music generation. Saar does not satirize rap as much as she asks us to consider its proponents as overlooked members of a self-identified group, as well as individuals. Using a contemporary vocabulary of media, these works include old album covers and spray painted ‘tagging’ underlying and overlaying portraits of young African American rap artists. Saar includes details such as abundant gold jewelry, diamonds, Rolex watches, and rolled joints as ubiquitous symbols of their self-empowerment and self-expression. Despite its pervasive influence on contemporary music, many of us tune out rap music, finding it too discordant or unrelated to our lives. Saar’s work asks us to reconsider the creativity and brilliance of the rap phenomenon, its’ genesis in the musical call-and-answer rhythms and oral story telling of Africa, as well as the intimidating imagery and the braggadocio of today’s gangster rap culture,
Following the abundant iconography and crowded surfaces of her earlier work, Saar’s Africans series appears austere in its simplicity. In her latest work, Saar superimposes African faces against swatches of flocked, Victorian fabric. Only the hairstyles of the portraits betray an affinity between the painted faces and the elaborate, gilded frames that surround them. Initially the lack of detailed imagery is unsettling in its difference from Saar’s other work. However, through pro longed consideration, the myriad variations among the paintings become apparent: These are not merely Africans, but are portraits of individuals, their varying skin tones and distinctive personal adornment offered as tribute to their unique characters. In scanning these works too quickly, the viewer misses the subtle differences among the painted personalities: as well as the myriad similarities between them, and the singular, albino face.
Whether achieved through accumulation of details or subtle variation, Saar’s work suggests a visual encyclopedia of "Deliberate traces, registers of thought and feeling, suited to the place and time that gave them birth..,."
Barbara J. Bloemink, Ph.D.
November, 1999