An Evening with Alison Saar

This event is rescheduled to May 5 from its original date of May 12.

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Join Alison Saar in conversation with Mia curator Robert Cozzolino, about her work.

Alison Saar is a Los Angeles-based printmaker, sculptor, mixed-media, and installation artist whose work focuses on the African diaspora and Black female identity. Magic and the spirit world are important threads through her work.

Two of Alison Saar’s works, and three by her mother Betye Saar, are included in “Supernatural America: The Paranormal in American Art.” Alison Saar’s Cotton Demon (1993; shown above) is featured prominently and is one of the artist’s Agra Demons, part of an installation where, as she explains on Mia’s exhibition audio guide, “the crops actually become the embodiment of the enslavers and the oppressors…When I decided to create a figure that represented that spirit of cotton, the evilness of the cotton crop, I had it as a hungry child. And so, he has this cotton boll in his belly, and his hands, which have little gems on the fingertips, represent your bleeding fingertips, and this barren stamen that he’s holding up, this barren stick that he’s holding up. Just how it was just this hungry ghost child that consumed everything around it.”