Betye Saar's "The Liberation of Aunt Jemima"

Students Name
Professors Name
Course Code and Name
Date
Betye Saar, The Liberation of Aunt Jemima, 1972
Saar's work was politicalized in 1968, following the death of Martin Luther King but the Liberation for Aunt Jemimah became one of the works that were politically explicit. The artwork is a three-dimensional sculpture made from mixed media. It is considered to be a 3-D version of a collage (Tani 1090). Saar used the inspiration of a knick-knack she found of aunt Jemimah. Aunt Jemimah was holding a broom, on the other hand, a notebook on her stomach and a pencil on the other hand. While making the painting, she replaced the pencil with a gun and a grenade, and on the other hand, she placed the broom. In the lower center of the portrait, she placed a "mammy" holding a baby whose parents are from two races. The skirt of the mammy is made of a black fist, which is a symbol of black power. Saar put the assemblage in a box and then, painted the background with aunt Jemimah products.
In addition, the Saar made us of the racists and controversial image with the intention of making them symbols of empowerment. The use of a mullato child in the image was a representation of the ways that black women used to be exploited. Some were victims of rape and ended up giving birth to biracial kids. In other cases, black women had to give in to the sexual desires of white people for their safety. Therefore, the work was a symbol of empowering the black woman to rebel against their past experiences of enslavement. When the work was placed in the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 2007, Angela Davis claimed that the li...