TED Talk speakers insist that stories will save us. But do these shared narratives really have that kind of redemptive power?
People certainly enjoy a good story more than statistics. (Investor Warren Buffett is a legendary exception.) And it’s easier to grasp complex ideas when they come alive in a narrative. Yet, in tailoring these histories for a wider audience, writers often edit out crucial details.
I recently spoke with Betye Saar, a pioneering Black American artist who just celebrated her 97th birthday. Through her intricate assemblages and art installations, she reclaims the very elements that have traditionally gone missing from stories about her ancestors.
Heartbreak made visible
Saar grew up in South Los Angeles, where she watched Simon Rodia build the Watts Towers. The sprawling sculpture “looked like a castle” to the young girl, who learned that art could be made from anything.
Her assemblage Lullaby embodies this idea, juxtaposing a serving tray and an old photograph discovered at a local flea market. The vintage portrait captures the likeness of a “mammy” and her three charges, all dressed in their Sunday best.
Like most photographs, this one conceals as much as it reveals.
In the American South, “mammy” was both a term of endearment for “mother” and the title given to enslaved Black women forced to be nannies for wealthy white children. The woman in this photograph likely has children of her own. Who is caring for them? To reveal the bigger picture, Saar anchors the frame with the image of a forlorn Black child isolated in the corner.
Scrawled across the formal portrait are two verses from the lullaby Pretty Little Horses (sound up). The song gives voice to an enslaved woman who must care for her master’s children at the expense of her own:
Hush-a-bye, don't you cry
Go to sleep you little baby
When you wake, you will have cake
And all the pretty little ponies
Way down yonder, down in the meadow
There's a poor little lamby
Bees and butterflies flitting 'round his eyes
He's crying out for his mammy
A bittersweet assemblage
Saar’s assemblage Bittersweet (Bessie Smith) honors a jazz-and-blues legend who was born into poverty, orphaned at a young age, and went on to record some of the greatest songs in jazz history.
On the right side of the box, a cluster of red velvet roses, fushcia feathers, and a jeweled brooch encircle a photograph of two young ladies wearing headdresses similar to those favored by Smith. Were these girls the Swifties of their generation?
On the left side, a faded handbill promotes Smith’s sold-out engagement at the Frolic Theater in Birmingham, Alabama. A sequined brooch rests on top of the handbill.
Like so many of Saar’s hinged boxes, this one is both a shrine and a coffin. The white pocket watch is a memento mori—a symbol of the brevity of life, which foreshadows Smith’s untimely death. In 1937, the singer suffered a devastating car crash on Route 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale. The impact nearly severed her right arm at the elbow, causing her to bleed out.
Following her death, Smith’s estranged husband twice stole the funds raised for her headstone. Consequently, her grave remained unmarked for decades until Juanita Green, a former employee, partnered with singer-songwriter Janis Joplin to purchase a proper tombstone.
What does it mean to matter?
African American songs written during the 19th century are generally labeled “traditional American folk tune” with no composer credits. Time has erased the identity of so many great songwriters.
To honor these unnamed musicians, Saar created The Band at the Libya. This assemblage evokes a Harlem supper club founded in 1910 by the artist’s great-uncle, Robert Keys. Housed in an elegant mansion that dated back to 1796, the Libya restaurant served as a refined social space. “It was a classy place and these were classy people,” said Saar.
The artist began by laminating a photocopy of the Libya’s house band onto a honey-hued violin with black trim. She then added paper leaves to evoke a garden setting. Finally, she covered everything with a sienna-toned wash and converted the neck of the violin into the spine of a book—one that pointedly has no pages.
For years, Saar was a pioneer among Black women artists producing mixed-media art like this.
I think it’s what got me noticed. I was making these strange things that got attention and then acceptance—acceptance as real art. It wasn’t that I was trying to be different. I was doing what fascinated me and forging my own path.
Betye Saar, 2023
Here I am, standing proud
Saar’s passion for accrual and transformation (turning the ordinary into the extraordinary) extends to art installations. These creations draw viewers into immersive environments where every object bears the spiritual burden of its own past.
In I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break, Saar asks you to imagine you are a Black laundress ironing your employer’s sheets. Do you see the initials KKK stitched along the hem? They stand for Ku Klux Klan, a white-supremacist hate group. How would you feel encountering those letters?
On the ironing board, a chained iron rests beside the imprinted image of a woman. She looks out with an unflinching gaze that seems to say, “I must provide for my family so I will bend, but I will not break.”
Also imprinted on the board is a diagram of The Brookes, a notorious British ship that transported kidnapped Africans to the Americas. The schematic shows how sailors squeezed 500 men, women, and children into the lower cargo deck for a voyage many of them would not survive.
The pain of memory, the wish to forget
Saar’s body of work portrays nearly every kind of pain, from enslavement and lynching to broken families and failed romances. Yet, some of her work is so ethereal, it offers a momentary respite from the subject matter.
The installation Gliding Into Midnight, for example, is as ravishing as it is disturbing. It transports us to a transitional space between the magical night sky and the tragedy unfolding beneath it.
In this ghostly work Saar explores the horrors of the Middle Passage, the second leg of a triangular trade route. The first leg carried European cloth, brandy, and firearms to Africa in exchange for human beings. The second leg carried African men, women, and children to North America in exchange for sugar and tobacco. The final passage returned the bloodied ship to Europe.
In Gliding Into Midnight, ceramic black hands push through lumps of coal, reaching for stars hand-painted on silk taffeta. Below the floating vessel, the sinister image of the Brookes diagram reappears as a shadow, haunting us with memories of an industry centered on kidnapping.
Significantly, Betye Saar is one of the first American artists to focus on the chasm between the colonizer and the colonized—a divide the art world has been slow to bridge.
A nation is its narration
It’s hard to imagine today, but enslaved people were forbidden to read or write. As a result, oral storytelling was crucial to their survival. Similarly, Saar brings a storyteller’s eloquence to her art. She seduces us into thinking deeply about race because, as she says, racism enslaves us all.
Recently, Black American author Andrea Collier was invited to New York City to explain to an audience of media writers why she identifies as a “woke” journalist:
I wanted people to know that I had moved beyond being a third-person journalist to being a person who needed to be a witness in this very tumultuous time. But I didn’t know how far to go. I didn’t want to offend a mostly white audience as I talked about race and gender and class.
On stage, I closed my eyes for a moment and heard my grandfather’s voice: “Tell them the story. Just tell them. We are all witnesses.“
Journalist and author Andrea Collier, 2019
Postscript…
Two years after I wrote this piece, Betye Saar died peacefully in her sleep on July 26, 2026. You can see her art installation Drifting Toward Twilight at The Huntington museum in San Marino, California, thru November 30, 2027.