Betye Saar passed away just days shy of her 100th birthday, leaving behind an impossibly rich legacy built over a decades-long, prolific career. While her best-known work is findable at several area institutions in Los Angeles, this beguiling exhibition at the late artist’s longtime gallery shifts attention away from her canonical assemblages to examine an earlier aspect of her practice—significant and foundational work in costume design, theater, and performance.

        Spanning over two hundred objects—including original garments, production photographs, sketches and drawings, jewelry, and studio ledgers—the exhibition recalls her training in Applied Arts at UCLA, the direct engagement with theatrical space in her work at the Inner City Cultural Center, and handmade garments for the Renaissance Pleasure Faire at Paramount Ranch. In revealing a young artist’s innovative treatments of fabric and texture as active elements of narrative and symbolism, the exhibition makes clear how the partitioning of space, stage lighting, and dramatic framing directly informed the vision that would come to define her fine art.

        Though heavy in the documentation aspect, the installation design is watched over with a monumental sculptural installation, which takes the form of a stage set, rendered in grey scale like a memory, to give physicality and a sense of how to imagine Saar’s wearables actually being worn. The original clothing included further harkens to the several important sculptural installations she created using linens and laundry, identifying fabric as capable of carrying race- and gender-coded meaning in its very materiality. In the specific context of performance garb, Saar demonstrates a love of saturated color, dramatic lines, evocative pattern and texture, and the incorporation of unconventional materials which hint at the power of both theater and ritual.

        The jewelry and other body ornaments often feature heavy-gauge wire and dark cord strung with dense rows of cowry shells, amber beads, and oxidized brass medallions—all of which prefigure her emerging signature style and iconography in assemblage with delightful clarity. Leather pouches and bags made of thick brown and black cowhide are hand-tooled and stitched with heavy waxed thread, edged with long leather fringe, and fastened with brass buttons or bone toggles, with details including metal tokens, old keys, and found photographs tucked into flaps or pockets—all of which forcefully forecasts the elements of her nascent sculptural style.

        Paired with detailed archival ledgers tracking everything from theatrical contracts to the conceptualization of album covers for jazz legend Bennie Maupin, the show documents the material and economic progress of an independent artist whose dedication to community uplift never encountered a boundary it couldn’t blur. Furthermore, the show highlights the way in which Saar’s “radical” ideas about equality, liberation, and autonomy were always profoundly about the body and its neverendingly contested status as a site of politics, identity, history, mythology, folklore, revolt, imagination, and ultimately, renaissance.

Shana Nys Dambrot is an art critic, curator, and author based in downtown LA. Formerly the L.A. Weekly arts editor, she is a contributor to the LA Times, Alta Journal, WhiteHot, and other culture publications nationally.