ADAA Fair

Roberts Projects is pleased to return to the ADAA Fair with a retrospective survey of Betye Saar, continuing the gallery’s celebration of the artist’s life during her centennial year. Featuring a selection of rarely-exhibited works made throughout the mid-20th and 21st centuries, this presentation examines the substantial evolution and expansion of Saar’s multidisciplinary practice across more than six decades. By utilizing and combining a wide range of forms and methods—including painting, sculpture, collage, printmaking, photography, assemblage, installation and design—Saar explored the social, political and economic structures of America’s past and present. Though the range of works on view were made during different decades of Saar’s life, they are united by her unique sensibility and distinct visual language which contemplated the ways historical narrative intersects with ancestral memory and how everyday objects and materials can be transformed into vessels of metaphysical truth.

On view will be several works that debuted in landmark exhibitions during the early years of Saar’s practice, including Giza (1972), from Saar’s 1973 solo show at California State University, Los Angeles, and the wall assemblages Eternity (1974) and Journey to Zimbabwe (1974), which were featured in her 1975 solo show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Accompanying these works is a selection of materials sourced from Saar’s extensive personal archives: original artist statements, photographs, exhibition catalogues, press clippings and other ephemera provide historic context to both exhibitions from the 1970s.

Seen as a whole, this presentation honors Saar’s enduring legacy and sheds light on the life of a great American artist whose body of work continues to inspire present and future generations.

Building an Artist's Legacy: The Relationships That Shape Art History
Sunday, November 15th, 2pm
ADAA Fair 2026, Veterans Room at the Park Avenue Armory

Esther Adler, Curator, Department of Drawings & Prints at the Museum of Modern Art
Glenn Phillips, Chief Curator, Getty Research Institute
Julie Roberts, Co-founder, Roberts Projects
Moderated by Anna Stothart, Co-Founder, Davila-Villa & Stothart

In celebration of Betye Saar’s centennial, representatives from the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of Modern Art and Roberts Projects will explore how an artist’s legacy is built and sustained through an interconnected network of galleries, museums, scholars, and archives. Using Saar’s career as a lens, the conversation will examine legacy as an evolving process shaped by exhibitions, scholarship, institutional acquisitions and long-term relationships, with the gallerist often serving as a central point of continuity. The panel coincides with Roberts Projects’ solo presentation of Saar’s assemblage works at the ADAA Fair.

Betye Saar (1926–2026) was a pioneering figure in the Black Arts Movement of the mid-20th century whose practice was rooted in the personal narratives and cultural histories of the Black and African diaspora. Her formally complex and symbolically rich body of work made connections between the quotidian and the cosmic that underscored the environmental, cultural, political, racial, technological, economic and historical contexts in which it exists. In the early years of her career, Saar embraced the ritualistic process of accumulative sculpture to activate the ineffable power of her materials, which she gathered from flea markets, vintage stores and throughout her extensive travels. Her renowned mixed-media assemblages emerge from a sequence of gestures that meaningfully build upon each other, gradually transforming a series of individual parts into aesthetic objects with profound symbolic resonance.

The deeply political nature of Saar’s work reflected her own political consciousness, which was first shaped by the Civil Rights Movement and assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Like many women who were similarly moved by the events of this period, Saar adopted the feminist mantra ‘the personal is political,’ which became a fundamental principle of her fine art practice.

Roberts Projects booth is located at B1.

For additional information regarding the ADAA Fair, the please visit adaafair.org

For additional information, please contact Sage Malecki, Director at sage@robertsprojectsla.com

PRESS INQUIRIES
For press inquiries, please contact Hannah Gottlieb-Graham, ALMA Communications hannah@almacommunications.co