JC
The News and Observer reviews Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley and Alison Saar, the artwork of one mother and her two daughters.

The mother and daughters share mixed-race heritage — Betye has European, African-American and Native American roots, and her daughters’ father, the late painter and conservator Richard Saar, is of German and Scottish descent — which all three deal with in their work.

Lezley has created a witty series of “Mulatto Nation” porcelain commemorative plates, featuring Carol Channing, Jennifer Beals, “The Rock” and other celebrities. In “Me, Myself and Identity Crisis,” she depicts herself as levitating Siamese twins joined at the hip, one white, the other black.

In lush gold, sepia and black hues, Betye collages “Redbone and Black: Sunrise Squaw and Midnight Man” from photographs, fabric scraps, paint and feather. With a bold black handprint, she claims the heritage of the union of Native Americans and African-Americans.

Similarly, Betye asks us to consider the implications of shades of black in other works: “Cream,” a lyrical reverie on the melded races of her family illustrated by a baby’s dress decorated with buttons in a rainbow spectrum of skin hues, and “Coffee,” with its deep velvety tones.

Alison weighs in with “Si j’etais blanc (If I were white),” a mixed-media sculpture whose black upper torso opens to reveal a white interior filled with glass shards. It takes its name from a song by Josephine Baker, the famous African-American performer who enjoyed a freedom and success in Paris denied her in her native America.