Personal Story wall hanging inspired by Betye Saar
It is my goal as an artist to create works that expose injustice and reveal beauty. The rainbow is literally a spectrum of color while spiritually a symbol of hope and promise.
— Betye Saar
I am so excited to welcome my wonderful friend Suzy Ultman to the blog. Suzy is an illustrator, product designer, toy creator, and bookmaker. If you aren’t familiar with Suzy’s work do yourself a favor and wander over to her feed and take a peek at the “wee and wonderful” world she has created. It’s an inspiring and playful world filled with color, pattern, and lots of whimsical characters that will make your heart smile. If you’ve been a long time follower you might remember the “inspired by Suzy project” that I created a few years ago. Suzy has created a wonderful wall hanging project inspired by Betye’s use of personal narrative in her work. We will get to the making in just a bit but first we would like you to meet Betye!
I first discovered Betye Saar’s work when I was doing a deep dive into the assemblage work of Joseph Cornell for a class I was teaching. It was in a related search feed that I found “Black Girl's Window”. A painted silhouette of a girl, hands and face pressed into a window pane. Moons and stars above her head, a section of a tarot card, a sketched skeleton, an eagle with the word "love" etched across its chest. I had never seen anything like it. At first glance Betye’s work looks like an artifact from another world but when you lean in you see that it is very much from this world and it is connected to a powerful message and a power greater than art. Betye has a way of telling a story through symbols and artifacts that is both deeply personal and speaking to a larger truth. Themes of black womanhood, racism, spirituality, and mysticism are woven into each piece. Betye was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She has been a working artist for the past 60+ years. She is a mother to 3 daughters two of whom are also working artists. Betye is 94 years old and still creating new work. Her retrospective “still ticking” was on view in Arizona in 2016. In 2019 she had an exhibit at LACMA that featured the relationship between her sketchbooks and her finished works called “call and response”.
Scroll down to watch a recent interview with Betye, and take a tour of the Call and Response exhibit. Then make your own Personal Story wall hanging with Suzy!
watch a recent interview with betye:
Tour betye’s Call and Response Exhibit :
time to make some of your own art!
Personal Story Wall Hanging inspired by Betye Saar
contributed by: Suzy Ultman
My heart and mind were introduced to the world of Betye Saar through this special “Women’s Week Collective” project. It’s a world of bold prints and assemblages filled with themes of personal history, spirituality, mysticism, and racism. Betye attacks these complex motifs with organized precision, using primary colors, consistent symbology, and organized groupings. It’s easy to imagine Betye collecting, organizing, making, re-organizing, and so-on, until her creation evolves into a beautiful Betye-time machine, connecting both past and present. She is a beacon of strength, beauty, cultural reflection, and razor-sharp messaging.
“For half a century, Ms. Saar has been one of the country’s most inventive and influential makers of intimately scaled assemblage. And she has brought a distinctive range of content to the medium, encompassing global culture, popular mysticism, personal history, and American racism, which she cooly refers to as “national racism”, as if it were a scientific category, or a consumer brand” (Holland Cotter, It’s About Time!’ Betye Saar’s Long Climb to the Summit)
Betye was born in Los Angeles in 1926 to a mother who loved to garden and a father who taught Sunday school — nature and spirituality were a part of her life from an early age. When she was young, she was also exposed to public art made from scrap materials, absorbing the idea that art could be made of anything.
Betye went to college excited to pursue art, but was discouraged since she was a woman. She tried her hand at social work, and eventually found a creative outlet in graphic design. After marriage, kids, and divorce, Betye, a single mom, returned to school. She headed into the printmaking studio with an experimental & passionate spirit.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, Betye’s experimental spirit grew, along with her personal themes, and activism role in arts. From the 80s to the present day, Betye has focused on having social and political conversation with her audience. Betye’s art marched alongside the civil rights movement and continues to move and challenge hearts and minds today.
MATERIALS
Cereal Box or Chipboard
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steps
brainstorm your symbols
Personal History: discuss family traits, places you’ve lived, places grandparents & great-grandparents have lived
Spirituality: discuss love, nature, connection, and/or religion
Mysticism: discuss the effect of the sun & moon on the ebb & flow of nature, birth signs, maybe look-up some palmistry
Personal identity: if comfortable/age appropriate, discuss name, gender, face (hair color, skin color, eye color, glasses, etc), ethnicity, language spoken, ability, what do you want to be when you grow-up, etc
Sketch your symbols
symbols based around your themes:
1. Personal History: HOUSES & EYES
2. Spirituality: RAINBOW
3. Mysticism: STARS, MOONS, SUN, HANDS (For the color-blocked hand, I drew my life lines, and used them as coloring guides.)
4. Personal Identity: GIRL (For this project, my girl is a nod to Betye Saar.)
Draw your symbols
on the unprinted side of the cereal box. Cut-out your shapes.
Pick your palette
I tweaked Betye’s primary palette, and used PINK/YELLOW/BLUE. Now, it’s time to paint!
add words
You can add more personal touches by writing words that inspire you, names of family members, birth dates, etc.
add a hanging loop
When everything is dry, hole punch each piece at the top and bottom. String as shown. Then, tape the back (see photo) to secure the string. Voila! now it’s time to hang 😊
SUZY ULTMAN has been creating toys and books for family and friends since childhood. A born storyteller, Suzy is an illustrator, product designer, toy creator, and bookmaker of sophisticated and simple objects that inspire and delight young and old alike.
Suzy grew up in Pennsylvania but her life and work have taken her around the world both as a visitor and a resident. From living in Los Angeles to Portland, across the sea to Amsterdam and back to Boston, Suzy’s exploration and immersion into these places influences her work even today. Whether gracing your bookshelf or decorating a nursery, Suzy’s signature products tell a story of connection, community and finding your place within our global family.
When she isn’t in her studio folding paper, designing textiles, or creating toys, she can be found strolling through antique shops, finding treasures at flea markets, and communing with nature. She's nested with her husband and three sons in their cozy home in Ohio.
