Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail

1973

Betye Saar was a prominent member of the Black Arts Movement. Drawing from diverse cultural associations, and influenced both by self-taught artist Simon Rodia’s massive sculptural installation Watts Towers, constructed in the 1960s in her hometown, and by the intimate found-object constructions of American modernist Joseph Cornell, Saar developed a politically potent and personally meaningful practice rooted in assemblage. In Liberation of Aunt Jemima: Cocktail Saar transforms a Gallo wine jug, a 1970s marker of middle-class sophistication, into a tool for Black liberation. For Sacred Symbols fifteen years later she transfigures the detritus one might find in the junk drawer of any home into a composition with spiritual overtones.