Alison Saar at Phyllis Kind - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Art in America, Jan, 1996 by Tom Eccles

Collectively titled "Strange Fruit" after Billie Holiday's haunting 1939 lament on witnessing a Southern lynching, the nine female figures in this exhibition offer a poignant reminder that cultural boundaries continue to define contemporary art. In Alison Saar's sculptures, one can almost hear Holiday's deadpan rendition: "From the land of the shadows comes a dreadful sight. Lady with the marble smile. Spirit of the night. See the scourge of innocence swinging in her hand. Hear the silent suffering that echoes through the land." Strung up by her ankles just inside the gallery was a clumsy, larger-than-life female. Rusting tin plates are nailed over the naked body she piteously tries to cover with her rough-hewn hands. Embedded in her belly, at viewers' head height, is an old keyhole. This figure, itself titled Strange Fruit, marked the entrance to an assembly of sculptural treasures.

Saar's sculpted-wood-and-found-object figures evoke the African diaspora. She draws from a rich array of African and Haitian folklore, contemporary African-American cultures, Catholicism, Santeria, voodoo and mythology. Her focus, however, remains the black female experience. Terra Rosa (1993) is a life-size seated woman smeared with the red soil she holds out above her pregnant belly. From her open mouth spills yet more dirt. She consumes and is consumed by the earth. Her posture and headdress recall Egyptian and Central African sculpture; the regenerative soil - clearly for Saar a symbol of the organic nature of the feminine - refers to the homeopathic use of earth plasters and the belief in the spiritual power of cemetery earth in the African-American South. The mother/nature theme recurs in Clean House (1992), a large wooden figure covered with aluminum paint, standing among silver-birch branches that weave in and out of her proud body. Saar has eerily given her two shards of mirror glass for eyes.

In the world Saar creates, religion, ritual and myth are engaged with the honesty and directness of folk art. We are far from so-called victim art. Power and conviction are clear in three small 1995 figures made of old tin roofing, nails and rusted garden tools. Ho', set upon and rising out of the handle of a hoe, recalls the lynched figure at the doorway, only here the hands provocatively point to genitals and breast. Pitch, emerging from the handle of a pitch fork, coyly pushes her chest out and raises her right arm behind her head. Dig (the figure is part of a shovel), clenched fists raised to her chin, has an intensely struggling face below a furrowed brow. These works show that the artist, who studied abstract art and color theory but had no formal training in sculpture, can movingly apply her found materials in the exploration of cultures unfamiliar to many in her audience.