5 powerful works by Betye Saar that represent her fearless vision, in art and life

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Betye Saar, the groundbreaking assemblage artist who helped redefine American art and kickstart the Black women’s movement, died Monday. Throughout a prolific career that spanned decades, Saar brought issues of race and racism to the foreground in ways that were immediate and visceral. Her work also highlighted her own rich and varied life experiences. The hardworking mother of three daughters called Los Angeles home and collected much of the material for her work from the city’s many flea markets and second hand shops. Here are five of Saar’s best creations.

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“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” 1972

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Among the most famous pieces in Saar’s oeuvre, this smallish piece, just shy of 1-foot-tall, made a gigantic splash in the art world when it was first shown during the “Black Contributions” invitational at the Rainbow Sign — a Black cultural center in Berkeley near the Black Panther headquarters. Saar made the piece for the show, which issued an open invitation to Black artists to create work about Black heroes. Saar equipped an Aunt Jemima Black mammy figurine with a rifle alongside her broom, and placed a derogatory postcard in front of it featuring another Black mammy with a mulatto child. The assemblage turned the damaging caricature into a revolutionary hero, and made Saar a star of the Black Arts movement. Many years later, activist Angela Davis credited Saar, and “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” with starting the Black women’s movement.

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“Black Girl’s Window,” 1969

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Created as Saar shifted her practice from mostly printmaking to collage and assemblage, “Black Girl’s Window,” is a largely autobiographical work that features a shadowed face in a weathered wooden window frame, her hands — painted with astrological signs — pressed against the glass as she peers out. Two eyes appear to open and shut as a viewer moves around the piece. It’s impossible to see an expression on the girl’s face, but a feeling of longing emanates from the glass. In eight smaller frames of glass at the top of the window, Saar added various images including stars, phases of the moon, a skeleton and a phrenological chart. “I don’t know a single Black girl who hasn’t had a profound connection to ‘Black Girl’s Window,’ ” curator and Saar’s biographer, Zoé Whitley, told The Times in a recent interview. “It’s both a self-portrait and a mirror in which a singular perspective can reach out to so many.”

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“Vision of El Cremo,” 1967

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This delicate early assemblage work was inspired by a 1967 visit to an exhibition featuring boxed assemblages by Joseph Cornell at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon Museum). It features the base of an old sewing machine pasted over with a cigar box wrapper and the oft-reoccurring theme of a moon, sun and stars. The weathered thread compartment holds two toy horses with armed riders in red coats. The piece foreshadows Saar’s penchant for transforming common items into near-mystical objects with seemingly simple flourishes that belie complex themes.

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“Oasis,” 1984

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Originally exhibited in 1984 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in a small brick building across from the Temporary Contemporary, “Oasis” was the second half of a two-part solo exhibition staged by the museum that fall. The first half included 48 assemblages from 1967 to the present, and the second half was “Oasis,” a large-scale, site-specific work that took up the whole room. It featured a futuristic barren desert-like landscape filled with sand punctuated by large colored glass bulbs that resemble marbles. A small pink wicker chair sits at the center of the creation, unoccupied and windswept. At the time, Saar told The Times that the installation was “about dualities and how they dovetail,” but it was more than that. It represents a leap in the evolution of Saar’s work — her smaller scale imaginings now writ large.

“I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break,” 1998

One of Saar’s most powerful works is held in the permanent collection of Los Angeles County Museum of Art and was featured in the inaugural exhibition of its new David Geffen Gallerieswhen it opened last Spring. The deceptively simple work is part sculpture, part assemblage, part collage and features a vintage wooden ironing board set beside a white sheet hung on a line with six wooden clothespins. A closer look reveals that the sheet is appliquéd with the letters KKK, and the iron is chained to the board. The board also bears an imprint featuring the British slave ship Brookes with a Black mammy superimposed over it. Taken together, the collection of images makes a profound statement about slavery, forced labor and continuing racism in America.