Artist Alison Saar will be honored this Saturday, September 20, at the David C. Driskell Gala at Atlanta's High Museum of Art, where she will receive the prestigious Driskell Prize. The award, which comes with an unrestricted $50,000 grant, recognizes artists and scholars who advance the legacy of African American art. Saar becomes the 20th recipient of this distinguished honor, joining previous winners including Naomi Beckwith in 2024, Amy Sherald in 2018, and Xaviera Simmons in 2008.
For Saar, art has been her "first language" since childhood. Raised in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, by artist parents Richard and Betye Saar, she grew up in a household where creativity flourished without boundaries. "We always felt that we could just make whatever we wanted to and everything was good and worthwhile and had value," Saar reflects. "There was no such thing as a bad painting or drawing. I think that was an incredible gift from both my parents, and gave us a lot of freedom to just develop into the artists that we are."
Saar's artistic practice is characterized by her unique folk-influenced style that primarily depicts Black women and girls. Her work stands out for its material experimentation and scholarly foundation, showing deep reverence for African diasporic histories, motherhood, and spiritualities. She frequently addresses themes of chattel slavery, incorporating cash crops like sugarcane, cotton, rice, indigo, and tobacco while offering speculative depictions of revolt and empowerment.
The artist works across multiple mediums, creating drawings in charcoal and chalk, paintings in watercolor and acrylic, and sculptures often assembled from found objects or carved from sturdy wood. In her figures, hammered metals become beautiful dark skin peppered with nails, while wires form afro crowns or cascade like hair. Vintage ceiling tin patterns decorate sculpted dresses, and her subjects brandish antique, burnished farming equipment.
"I became really interested in looking at a revolution and sort of revolting against our circumstances by using the only weapons we had, which were our tools," Saar explains. "And this idea that you kind of turn scythes and sickles and hoes and machetes into weapons for freedom." This fascination with ancestral history stems from being raised by strong women involved in the Civil Rights Movement, particularly her mother and grandmother.
Saar's grandmother was an activist in the Pasadena chapter of the NAACP, and a copy of Lorraine Hansberry's "The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality" (1964) sat prominently on her coffee table. Her mother, Betye Saar, is a celebrated artist of the Black Arts Movement, renowned for assemblage and printmaking. The mother-daughter duo has collaborated on works like "House of Gris Gris" (1989) and exhibited together in the traveling show "Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley, and Alison Saar."
Motherhood became a transformative force in Saar's artistic journey. The birth of her first child sparked her specific focus on portraying women and girls. "It just seems like magic that women can usher these new souls and spirits into the world," she reflects. Her daughter later became the model for several artworks, including "Mirror Mirror (Mulata Seeking Inner Negress)" (2006) and "Rise Sally Rise" (2003). "My whole career has always been kind of marked on this calendar of my children and their development and where we were," she notes.
The Driskell Prize, judged this year by art historian Kellie Jones, artist Willie Cole, and High Museum curators Kevin W. Tucker and Maria L. Kelly, alternates between recognizing scholars and artists. "I think what's so amazing about the Driskell Prize is that it alternates between scholars and artists," Saar remarked. "It's so essential that we cannot succeed without the help of the other, and to really understand that we need to uplift both scholars and artists in order to survive and be seen out there."
Saar first learned about David C. Driskell, the prize's namesake, as an undergraduate at Scripps College from her mentor Samella Lewis. Driskell curated the groundbreaking 1976 exhibition "Two Centuries of Black American Art" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which Saar describes as a powerful introduction to his scholarship. Over time, the two developed a friendship through mutual connections and both served on the board of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
This weekend's celebration marks a meaningful return to the High Museum for Saar. Her first visit was for her 1993 exhibition "Fertile Ground," one of her earliest solo shows that coincided with her pregnancy. She vividly remembers arriving in Atlanta and being struck by "that humidity and the smell of the dirt and the smell of the Georgia Pine. And when you're flying over and you see that red clay – the fertility of that space, just, really – it was really overpowering for me."
Since that early exhibition, Saar's work has been displayed at prestigious institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Her largest retrospective to date, "Of Aether and Earthe," ran from 2020 to 2021 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. This past summer marked another milestone with her first European exhibition at Galerie Lelong in Paris, the same city where she was commissioned to create a permanent public monument for the 2024 Olympic Games.
Saar's recent achievements continue to accumulate. Last week, she announced her latest public art commission for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, adding to her growing list of prestigious projects. As she settles into a new studio, the artist looks forward to unencumbered creation – the same freedom she enjoyed when first making art as a child.
During her recent studio move, Saar discovered lost materials from decades past, ready to be reincorporated into new works. "I'm really excited to pull those things out and see if they inspire anything, inspire any directions, and just to get busy and play without any sort of preset ideas or without any deadlines or without any obligations," she says. While this blank slate feels "frightening on one hand," she finds it "also really liberating." As she prepares to receive the Driskell Prize, Saar embraces the opportunity to explore new creative territories: "I'm very excited to have the opportunity to explore again."
