The centerpiece of the Neubauer Collegium’s newest exhibition, Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar, is a robe shaped by colonial legacies, its displacement from African ritual to museum display, and its pivotal role in Saar’s artistic awakening. It lies flush against one of the walls of the gallery space. Close inspection reveals the small protrusions adorning the robe to be tufts of hair. Bamoi / Bamum Robe, a ceremonial robe made of jute and human hair by the Bamum people in the late 19th century, catalyzed Saar’s shift as an artist from costume design toward spiritually charged, ritualistic assemblages.
Born in 1926, Saar first saw the robe at a Field Museum exhibition in 1974 as part of the National Conference of Artists. It has a complicated history, likely including coercion from European art dealers to purchase it from the Bamum people in the 1920s. The aesthetic and ethical questions surrounding the robe give further power and meaning to Saar’s transformation. The exhibit notes that Saar imagined a Bamum king wearing the robe with “a little bit of everybody on it.” The robe features a leopard pattern associated with leadership and power. Saar, a pioneer in the Black assemblage movement, felt this inspired her move from costume design toward making “contemporary, powerful, [and] ritualistic” art. The work inspires the audience to ask questions about the ethics and history of colonialism’s long shadows in museums and galleries—how the aesthetics of power are preserved and how artists like Saar interrupt and redefine that narrative.
The exhibition’s title is both a call to action and an invitation for the viewer to engage with the art on display, fitting perfectly with the exhibition’s focus: Saar’s costume design. This robe appears opposite and in conjunction with her costume design work from the late 1960s and early 1970s. Saar’s work fills the large vitrine in the gallery’s center with sketches, facsimiles, and photographs. Next to playbills of the shows she designed for are colorful drawings of costumes and composite characters she foregrounds with grace and technical precision. Elsewhere in the exhibition space is clothing she created—both before and after 1974—as well as sketches from her Field Museum trip.
This show is part of Neubauer’s Panafrica: Histories, Aesthetics, Politics, an ongoing multiyear research project. In collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC) and the Field Museum, this project explores the connections between Pan-African politics and culture. This project recently produced the AIC’s special exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, a review of the evolution of Pan-African thought through art. Where the AIC show fails to deliver a clear message because its themes, pieces, and layout lack a cohesive structure, this exhibition succeeds by limiting its scope and establishing a clear goal. As outlined by curator Dieter Roelstraete in the exhibition’s opening remarks, the goal of the show is to expose the continuities in Saar’s design work before this fateful encounter and the assemblages she had been shifting her energies toward during the early- to mid-1970s.
A personal favorite of mine among these is Burlesque Is Alive: Stagolee (1970). A drawing of Stagolee in full, standing as if to take measure of the horizon, looks longingly past the viewer. Smaller drawings of his coat and hat join the notes Saar made to provide further details about the look. Saar notably has stapled the fabrics intended to compose the costume onto the drawing. This decision empowers the viewer to compare the colored drawing with the actual product, matching visual and imagined with tactile and concrete. While viewing this piece, I found a sense of both calm and wonder within me. Seeing an oft-overlooked aspect of the design process for a production take center stage led me to question how costume design, like fashion, has a natural connection to art. It also led me to question how these works connected to Bamoi / Bamum Robe.
While these pieces provide an excellent overview of her work prior to becoming a contemporary artist, the show at times falls short of providing more than an overview. Some of the works, such as Cheetah Dress (1969), transcend this label of “summary” and provide a great example of how her work pre-1974 matches her work after 1974. However, the vast majority viewers may only perceive her works after her encounter with the robe as “fine art,” leaving it up to the viewer’s standards of what defines art. I was more impressed with her skill as costume designer than I was interested in making the connection between costume design and her assemblages. The exhibition also self-sabotages in a way: while evocative, the exhibition lacks the necessary context in both artwork and information for visitors to draw a substantial message from the exhibition alone. Perhaps making this distinction clearer would have delivered a stronger message for the viewer. Regardless, Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar serves as a fine introduction to Saar’s pre-1974 work and the origins of her artistic metamorphosis. This single, profound encounter serves as a microcosm through which we can begin to understand the essence of inspiration and tradition.
