Alison Saar has been making art her whole life. “I say it was kind of like my first language,” she tells Hyperallergic. Raised by artists Richard and Betye Saar, she and her sisters “were always making and drawing things, probably even before we were speaking much …. There was really no getting away from it.”
Brought up in Laurel Canyon, an enclave in Los Angeles, California, she and sisters Lezley and Tracye were always encouraged to experiment and create with abandon, “no matter how funky or weird it was,” which fortified their burgeoning creative passions. “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.”
This Saturday, September 20, Saar will be celebrated for this lifetime of artmaking — a practice characterized by a unique, folk-influenced style primarily depicting Black women and girls — at the David C. Driskell Gala at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art. She is the 20th recipient of the Driskell Prize, an unrestricted $50,000 award dedicated to artists and scholars furthering the lineage of African American art. Judges for this year’s honor are art historian and professor Kellie Jones, its inaugural recipient; artist and 2006 Driskell Prize honoree Willie Cole; and High Museum curators Kevin W. Tucker and Maria L. Kelly.
Alison Saar, “Salon” (2024), cast bronze and stone (© Alison Saar; photo by Fred Mauviel, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
“I think what’s so amazing about the Driskell Prize is that it alternates between scholars and artists. 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 remarked in an interview with Hyperallergic ahead of the gala. “It’s just really an amazing gift to the Black arts community on both levels.”
Saar remembers learning of David C. Driskell, the artist and historian for whom the prize is named, as an undergraduate at Scripps College from her mentor and professor, Samella Lewis. Driskell curated the momentous 1976 exhibition, Two Centuries of Black American Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which Saar says was a powerful introduction to his scholarship. Over time, Saar and Driskell would come to know each other through mutual friends and artistic connections, both serving on the board of the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture.
“Having known David and really admired him for all these years, it was just really lovely to have my name amongst the list of all the amazing artists and scholars that have been granted this honor,” Saar says. Previous recipients include Naomi Beckwith in 2024, Amy Sherald in 2018, and Xaviera Simmons in 2008.
Saar herself has become an integral part of the Black art canon. Her work is notable for its material experimentation and scholarly foundation, as well as its reverence for African diasporic histories, motherhood, and spiritualities. She often portrays chattel slavery, incorporating cash crops like sugarcane, cotton, rice, indigo, and tobacco, and offering speculative depictions of revolt and empowerment.
Detail of Alison Saar, “Queen of the Boneyard” (2025), wood, ceiling tin, wire, dominoes (© Alison Saar; photo by Matt Emonson, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
Saar crafts with a wealth of materials across mediums: drawings in charcoal and chalk, paintings in watercolor and acrylic, and sculptures often assembled from found objects or carved into sturdy wood. In Saar’s figures, hammered metals become beautiful dark skin, peppered with nails, and wires form the crown of an afro or sprout like cascading hair. The vintage patterns of ceiling tin decorate their sculpted dresses, and they 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.”
She says this interest in her ancestral history comes from being nurtured by strong women involved in the Civil Rights Movement, specifically her mother and grandmother. “I was raised on really studying and respecting our history and always wanting to further push that line in terms of equity and justice for African Americans and people of color in the United States,” Saar explains.
Alison Saar at Arion Press, San Francisco, California (2024) (photo by Nicholas Lea Bruno, courtesy L.A. Louver, Venice, California)
She remembers her grandmother as an activist involved in the Pasadena chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and that a copy of Lorraine Hansberry’s The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality (1964) sat on her coffee table. Her mother, Betye Saar, is a celebrated artist of the Black Arts Movement, renowned for her assemblage and printmaking. The mother-daughter pair have collaborated on works like “House of Gris Gris” (1989) and exhibited alongside one another in the traveling exhibition Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley, and Alison Saar.
Meditating on their influence, Saar expresses that she was “surrounded by really strong Black women and always in awe at their abilities to raise families and to nourish them and to work — they all were workers — and then at the same time, to just bring beauty into the world as artists or as craftpersons.”
Later, Saar’s own journey into motherhood would become a consequential force on her artmaking. The birth of her first child catalyzed a specific desire to focus her portrayals mostly on women and girls. “It just seems like magic that women can usher these new souls and spirits into the world,” she muses.
Alison Saar, “Feral Son” (c. 1980), mixed media (© Alison Saar; courtesy High Museum of Art)
Her artistic career became interconnected with these milestones of parenthood, and her daughter would later become the model for some of her artworks, like “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 reflects.
Her return to the High Museum to receive the Driskell Prize at Saturday’s gala marks a return to a rich moment in her history as an artist. Her first trip to the Atlanta institution was for her 1993 exhibition Fertile Ground — one of her first exhibitions, which also coincided with her pregnancy and the birth of her daughter, she recalls. She recounts “getting off the plane and just being hit with 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.”
While Fertile Ground was one of Saar’s earliest solo shows, her work has since been displayed at museums and galleries like the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, with her largest retrospective to date, Of Aether and Earthe, taking place from 2020 to 2021 at the Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College and the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena. Her first European exhibition went up this past summer at Galerie Lelong in Paris, the same city where she was commissioned to create a permanent public monument for its 2024 Olympic Games. Her most recent public art commission, announced last week, is for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
Installation of Alison Saar: Sweet Life at Galerie Lelong, Paris, France (©Alison Saar; photo by Fabrice Gibert, courtesy Galerie Lelong, Paris, France)
With these accolades under her belt, Saar is looking toward the future. She shares that she is settling into a new studio and is excited about the prospect of unencumbered creation — the same freedom she enjoyed when she first began making art. During the move, she’s unearthed lost, decades-old materials, ready to be reincorporated into her practice.
“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. To her, this blank slate is “frightening on one hand, but it’s also really liberating …. I’m very excited to have the opportunity to explore again.”
