Biography
Alison Saar is a sculptor and engraver. Her father, Richard Sarr, was a ceramist and art restorer; her mother is the artist Betye Saar. A graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California and of the Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles, over the last forty years, Sarr has made a rich body of work that is still little known in Europe. It is composed of sculptures and installations at the crossroads of various influences (Afro-American culture, Caribbean folklore and spirituality, mythology and art brut) and centred essentially on the identity of black women in the United States.
Saar has, moreover, developed a unique printmaking practice, experimenting with woodcut, silkscreen, linocut and lithography. Echoing her sculptural practice, which incorporates numerous found objects, her prints are sometimes printed on different media – jute sacks, old handkerchiefs and tea towels, etc. – and enriched by collage and chine collé techniques, revealing a surprising material intensity.
Alison Saar’s work has been exhibited in prestigious American museums, and can be found in the collections of MoMA (New York), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles), the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington) and the National Gallery of Australia (Canberra). Several of her sculptures have been installed in public spaces in the United States. In 2024, her work “Salon” was inaugurated in the Aznavour garden in Paris to coincide with the Olympic Games. In 2025 Alison Saar received the David C. Driskell Prize in African American Art and Art History, established by the High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Saar was also commissioned by Obama Foundation to create a specific work for the Obama Presidential Center to open in Chicago in 2026.
