A profile of artist Betye Saar on the occasion of her 100th birthday and costume design show at Roberts Projects

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”

Betye Saar practically levitates into the room wearing a Max Mara jacket that resembles a bird’s plumage, with a butter-yellow silk Dior dress grazing the ground behind her and a cane in her hand. This is look No. 1 at the photo shoot for this story, and everyone in the room — producers, photo assistants, editors — stop to stare, little gasps mutating into big ones. Saar’s magnetism either comes from being one of the most important living artists of the last century, the fact that her 100th birthday is approaching or being a Leo. In any case, every so often, she lets out a laugh that is so mischievous and exalting, or makes a joke that is completely disarming in its self-deprecation, and we all feel like we’ve won. You’re left anticipating the next time she will laugh like that. It’s a Tuesday afternoon, and Saar has spent the morning in hair and makeup, a departure from her usual morning routine of painting watercolors or working in the garden at her home studio in Laurel Canyon, wearing whatever version of rustic-art-matriarch-casual she’s decided on that day.

Stylist Erik Ziemba presents her with the option of two slip-on shoes — one, in an animal print, inspires the animated response of a little girl choosing a shiny pair of new Mary Janes for Easter: “Look at those!” Saar yelps in an elevated octave before slipping them on … And not two seconds later kicking them off. No warning or explanation needed, no questions asked. We’re going barefoot.

“You tell me how to pose because you work with models,” she says to photographer Gioncarlo Valentine, as a formality, maybe, because shortly after she launches herself into a variety of poses that makes it clear she understands exactly which way her body should take shape in the frame. Craning her neck into elegant lines, she sculpts herself into the rendering she wants.

“I’m working with one now,” Valentine quips back.

Betye responds matter-of-factly, as she does. “I am not a model. I’m Betye Saar, the artist.”

Saar wears a Max Mara jacket, Christian Dior dress and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

Saar is, of course, among the most iconic artists to come out of L.A., ever. The Getty Research Institute called her “one of the most innovative and visionary artists of our era” when it acquired her archive in 2018. She is known mostly for her assemblage and mixed media works that deal with racism, the complexities of Black domesticity and womanhood, often taking derogatory paraphernalia — Black dolls, mammy figures — and flipping the whole narrative on its head, or giving it a rifle (“Liberation of Aunt Jemima”). Saar was born in L.A., spending her early years in Watts watching Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from dust (one of her earliest influences), and later grew up in Pasadena. In Saar’s world, items have always held their own energy, and in her hands that energy is transmuted into something wholly unique. Her work courses with an assured mysticism that makes her feel so emblematic of L.A. itself.

Her new show at Roberts Projects, opening May 30, lets us in on a different but equally foundational branch of Saar’s story: her costume design work. Called “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” the show delves into the years Saar spent in the costume department for the Inner City Cultural Center’s theatrical productions, which allowed her to support her family and also pursue her larger calling of making art, aligning with some of her most seminal works, including “Black Girls Window.” “Let’s Get It On” also gives us a look into the interiority of Saar’s home life — how fashion and clothing, even if they were practical pursuits, were always a part of her story as an artist.

Fans, and even close friends of Saar’s, didn’t know that costume design was a part of her lore until this show. In an interview with CCH Pounder for the exhibition, the actor starts by telling Saar, “I had no idea you were doing all of this.” For a living legend as prolific as Saar, let alone one approaching her centennial, to still have new things for us to discover feels like a gift.

When I climb the stairs to Saar’s home, a multilevel aerie in the canyon where she’s lived and made art since 1962 (Frank Zappa was her neighbor back in the day), I’m greeted by her longtime gallerist and friend Julie Roberts, co-founder and co-director of Roberts Projects. It was Roberts who started putting the pieces together for this show after finding a ledger in a flat file in Saar’s studio. Some version of the show was put on by University of Chicago’s Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society in 2025, but Roberts Projects will present around 200 objects from Saar’s archive, private collectors and the Inner City Cultural Center — including photographs, greeting cards, record cover designs, enamel plates, handmade jewelry, costume design sketches and garments.

One of the pieces in the exhibition is an A-line shag mini dress in cheetah print that Saar made for herself in 1969, and has been passed through the hands of her daughters and granddaughters. With each generation, the hemline has gotten shorter. Loving animal prints, from what I understand, is a predestined disposition for Leo women. Something to remind them of their symbolic proximity to the sun and everything that it touches. “My memory of my grandmother’s style is purple hair and leopard print,” says Maddy Inez, an artist and Saar’s granddaughter, daughter of artist Alison Saar. “Half of her closet is leopard print.”

There’s a photo of Saar smiling with Alessandro Michele at the LACMA Art + Film Gala from 2019, the year she was honored and when he was still creative director at Gucci. She’s in one of her signature turbans — this one has a third eye front and center — and holds a cane in the shape of a black cat. Saar’s style can best be described as some combination of surreal and grounded — infused with the spirituality that has lived at the core of her work since the ’60s. It’s also earthy — as in global. Some of the most striking photographs from the exhibition are black-and-white images of Saar in North African garb by Carol A. Beers. Her sculptural face is framed by a crown of fabric wrapped around her head and is dripping with jewels. Her eyes are accentuated with a slick of winged black eyeliner. “I always liked things from other countries,” Saar says. “Asia, sometimes Mexico — my parents, when they were young, would go with other couples down to Tijuana and buy things. Other places always intrigued me.”

“Betye Saar in North African dress #2,” 1968, black and white photograph. From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Carol A. Beers)

From early on, Saar’s personal style said something very clear about her ethos and personality, a message that still floats over her head today: “That I had odd things to wear, things that were different, different fabrics, and that it was OK to wear those things,” Saar says. “Like a gathered skirt that was made out of some old piece of a dress or a costume that had been thrown away. Everything has a kind of particular energy, even though it’s static. Objects have it as well as people. You put one thing on top of another and assemble that energy, and that gives us a kind of power, in a way.”

She traces her relationship with making clothes back to being the eldest child of a seamstress. Saar’s mother, Beatrice Lillian Parson, taught her how to sew when she was around 10 years old. Making clothes was a means to an end, a necessity, and later, raising three girls after a divorce from her ceramist husband Richard Saar, was a matter of survival. As a kid she would make clothes for her dolls; as a young adult at Pasadena City College (Saar would later graduate with an applied arts degree from UCLA) she would make an outfit for herself and her sister before a big party. “It wasn’t really fashion for my sister and me, but making something to wear,” she says. “If you went to a party and it was going to be in three days, you’d go down to Woolworth’s and Newberry’s and buy fabric … It seemed natural to work with my sister or with a friend to make costumes and make clothes.”

It was this same practicality that pushed her to get a job at the Inner City Cultural Center, a multicultural theater company born in the wake of the Watts Uprising. “I went down to see and I said, ‘I would like to have a job, maybe in your costume department,’” remembers Saar. “They said, ‘Oh, well, what shows have you designed?’” And I said, “I haven’t designed anything, but I can design anything.”

“Let’s Get It On” features playbills, costume sketches and photographs from the productions Saar worked on at the ICCC, including “El Manco,” “Burlesque Is Alive,” “The Gnädiges Fräulein” (which she also designed a poster for) and others. Later that week at the gallery, Roberts shows me some of Saar’s costume design sketches in person. A series of them for ICCC’s production of “Antigone,” made for the 1969-1970 season, are essentially mixed media works, integrating materials like aluminum foil and cabinet liner paper. Saar hand-painted each figure, uncanny expressions hinting at some kind of inner world. She approached the costumes themselves as part of her assemblage practice, too, picking fabrics, jackets and dresses from thrift stores and repurposing them completely into something new for these productions that didn’t have much budget. Her understanding of color, composition and space all comes through here. “To me it was, ‘Oh, this is like art, but it’s a woman in a costume, and I can do that,’” Saar says. “That’s why I took a lot of time.”

Betye Saar, “Antigone: Blue Dress,” 1969-1970, mixed media on museum board, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Robert Wedemeyer)

Betye Saar, “The Gnadiges Fraulein: Cocalooney,” 1969-1970, mixed media on paper, from the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

Tracye Saar, who is her mother’s youngest daughter and also her studio manager, has memories of sitting under the long wooden tables at the ICCC, smelling the dust and oil from the sewing machines. She and her sisters were not only the witnesses, but the beneficiaries of their mother’s design work and relationship with style. She remembers Saar sporting many a turban, chunky jewelry and large hats. Each decade brought a twist, but overall, it was art opening chic. “I remember in the ’80s, I was in college and some friends came home for Easter one time,” Tracye says. “Betye had dyed her hair pink and they said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know your mom was punk.’ Betye said, ‘Oh no, I’m pink.’”

Saar would make clothes and costumes for her daughters that were custom and individual, taking their distinct personalities into account. We see a number of photos of Saar and her three daughters — Alison, now an artist, Lezley, now an artist, and Tracye, now a writer — wearing the costumes she made for Pleasure Faire, a renaissance fair at Paramount Ranch in Agoura Hills, which the family started attending every year after Saar’s kids took theater class with its founder, Phyllis Patterson. Tracye, who describes herself as the tomboy of the group, reminisces on being dressed as what she calls a little jester one year. “She had a bigger canyon group of hippie friends that were all kind of into that too,” Tracye remembers. “It was a social thing where it was worth her effort to make these costumes. She would get accolades and praise. She would help other people assemble their costumes as well: ‘Hey, here’s an extra scarf.’” Tracye also has a vivid memory of sitting on a bale of hay to watch her mother belly dance at Pleasure Faire. The costumes Saar made herself for these occasions are also well-documented in the exhibition through photographs and sketches. She is captured on stage in flowing layers, wearing corals and dusty pinks, with pants that hugged at the hip and a headpiece.

“Betye at Pleasure Faire #2, Irwindale, CA,” 1969, color photograph, 3.5 x 3.5 in (8.89 x 8.89 cm). From the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

“Alison, Tracye & Lezley Saar (Alison wearing skirt made by Betye),” 1970, color photograph; “Lezley Saar wearing leather necklace made by Betye,” 1971, color photograph, from of the artist and Roberts Projects, Los Angeles.

(Paul Salveson)

The exhibition also highlights Saar’s jewelry work. In one photo from 1972, Lezley wears a leather necklace Saar made for what looks like a school portrait. It’s multicolored and features an eye motif and beaded tassels hanging down toward the clavicle. Saar’s friend Alonzo Davis, a fellow artist in the L.A. scene who co-founded the Brockman Gallery to champion Black artists, gifted her with leather hide scraps which set off her series of leather works in the 1970s. Saar’s leather pieces, featured prominently throughout the show, are another example of how in her hands, everyday objects extend beyond any limitations, feeling more like collage than anything else. There is a photo of Saar with singer Len Chandler, her boyfriend at the time, and he’s wearing a custom leather vest she made for him. It’s layered with symbols — the Eye of Horus, a hand, a bird. Some of Saar’s leather necklaces are reminiscent of tribal loincloths, in a triangle shape that comes to a point, dyed and stitched in various colors. “My ancestors made things like this to wear and decorate their bodies,” Saar says. “It’s personal adornment.”

Back at the shoot, Saar is wearing one of these leather necklaces, paired with a Gucci kaftan that makes her petite frame look 20 feet tall. More than once, when the photographer approaches her to make an adjustment, Saar, half-joking with a rascally lilt in her voice, asks, “We’re done?” But no one understands the importance of documentation — of getting it all down — better than her.

Roberts has been working with Saar for 15 years and it’s because of Saar’s meticulous compulsion to keep and collect that she feels like there is still more to learn and share about the artist. “It’s all about the journey,” Roberts says. “The personal journey to continue to discover things about Betye. I can open a ledger and it’s like, ‘Oh, I forgot she designed costumes for the Tuskegee Choir.’ The other excellent tool is Betye’s memory, especially for the early times: I designed this, this was the individual that I worked with and I know where those sketches are. To not only have access to the archives, but Betye’s incredible memory, has been so vital for this show to take place.”

Roberts is not only Saar’s gallerist but a close friend, someone who clearly loves her and thinks endlessly about the best way to preserve her artistic legacy alongside her family. She played a part in spearheading the Betye Saar Legacy Group, which includes supporters and curators from across the globe, including Carlo Barbatti, a curator at Fondazione Prada, so that Saar could focus solely on making her art the way she wants to. (It was following the 2016 exhibition “Betye Saar: Uneasy Dancer” at Fondazione Prada that Roberts was inspired to start digitizing all of Saar’s archives.) When Saar visited Milan for the exhibition opening in 2016, Barbatti took her to the local flea markets. There was a magic in watching the things Saar gravitated toward, Barbatti says. She suggested he buy little vintage bells that he now cherishes and displays in his home. There is beauty in even the smallest action and output from Saar — something Barbatti wanted people to feel in the installation. “All the history inside the artwork and the symbols inside the artwork, is like a trip into a very beautiful world,” he says. “It’s full of poetry.”

Saar wears a Loro Piana robe, skirt and pants as headwrap, the artist’s own archival brooch from the 1980s-90s and Patricia Von Muslin jewelry.

The temptation to write about elders as if it’s some kind of miracle that they’re still holding onto even a shred of their former selves — she’s still got it! look at her go! — is too easy and too cheap when it comes to a person and artist like Saar. An incomplete list of things I’ve noticed about Saar from my short amount of time with her: She has a cutting sense of humor, she is incredibly decisive, she can put together a flower arrangement on a whim that looks like it should be a part of her archive, she is addicted to Dr. Pepper, she is proud of the artistic legacy she’s passed down to her family, and every single day, no matter what, she prioritizes making her art. “My grandma is such a quintessential Leo,” Inez says. “She has always been someone you don’t f— with while also being very loving and giving. There’s a certain strength that comes with, not only choosing to live as an artist — that is your income — but also as a Black woman who has three children.”

When you have an identity that is so clear, so chiseled, you are that way forever. You don’t become any less of yourself, but a deeper, richer concentration. “My body doesn’t feel any different — I mean, I don’t have the energy to dance a lot or to run or to be physically active that way, but I feel I’m still smart, I know how to cook, how to keep a house,” says Saar. “The most important thing — the most important part of my body — is my brain and my hand so I can hold a paintbrush, so that I can still think about what colors to put together. That came from just not giving up.”

Saar says she knows this will probably be the last exhibition of hers that she’s around to see and to give input on. I ask her how she wants people to feel, or what she wants them to think, upon walking into the show, which will span three exhibition rooms at Roberts Projects. She makes eye contact with me and smiles.

“Is she still making art?”