One sunny afternoon this June, the artist Betye Saar was surveying a table piled with twigs and branches and strips of bark. In a large shed on the grounds of the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California, curators bustled around the 97-year-old Los Angeles artist, offering for inspection materials they had gathered from the Huntington’s 207-acre estate: pieces of eucalyptus, dogwood, kiwi, palm.

Saar was creating a new sculptural installation for the Huntington, which opened to the public on November 11 and will remain on show in the museum’s Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art for two years. “How does it look to you, Betye?” enquired Robert Hori, the Huntington Gardens cultural curator and programme director.

Her white hair pushed up into a lilac baseball cap, clutching a stout walking cane, Saar peered at the display. “It looks like a lot of branches on a table!” she shot back, to laughter. “But we’ll work our magic on it.”

The centrepiece of Saar’s installation, “Drifting Toward Twilight”, is a vintage wooden canoe, 17 feet long, which appears to float a few inches from the ground in the middle of a dimly blue-lit space. Inside the canoe, three bird cages contain antlers; at either end, standing like guards, are heavy carved wooden finials (purchased by Saar from an LA garden store), also adorned with antlers.

Fixed under the canoe’s hull, strips of blue and green neon illuminate the bark and brushwood beneath, arranged by Saar to resemble flowing water. Subtly shifting lighting in the blue-painted gallery mimics the progression of dawn to dusk to night. The atmospheric effect of this immersive environment, as Saar intends it, is of being “at the bottom of the ocean”.

Saar has included ships and boats in her work before. To many, she is best known for her assemblage sculpture and collages, made from found objects and images, which comment on the history of African-American slavery and subjugation. In Saar’s sculpture “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” (1972), a figurine of a “mammy” — a racist stereotype of a head-scarfed black servant, the enduring mascot of Aunt Jemima-brand pancakes — clutches a rifle in one hand, and is foregrounded by a fist in a Black Power salute.

That work captures the themes running through Saar’s life and work: domesticity and political activism; feminism and racial politics. In a later installation, “I’ll Bend But I Will Not Break” (1998), she printed a copy of the infamous diagram of the British slave ship the Brookes, which depicts African bodies stacked like cordwood, on to a wooden ironing board. A white sheet, embroidered with the initials “KKK”, hangs on a washing line.

A few weeks after her visit to the Huntington, I am speaking with Saar at her hillside home in Los Angeles’ Laurel Canyon, a leafy dell of winding lanes known in the 1960s as a countercultural redoubt. She has lived there since 1962 — before such colourful neighbours as Frank Zappa, Jim Morrison and Joni Mitchell moved in — and raised three daughters there. Her garage and a basement level serve as her studio, and are packed high with half-made sculptures and salvaged materials for possible future works.

I press her on interpretations of “Drifting Toward Twilight”, suggesting a narrative connection between the vessel, the caged antlers and the non-native plants now growing on the former estate of a railway magnate. Is this boat riding the waves of colonial history?

“It’s not that political,” Saar says. “That’s the easiest thing to think of — the ships that brought slaves over. But it’s pre-slavery.” With this installation, she is thinking of timescales grander than the relatively brief history of the US. “I suppose at one time the Huntington was covered with water,” Saar adds. “Most of the world was covered with water.” 

She explained that her abiding fascination with canoes began in the 1980s, when she lived beside a lake while teaching at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine. Her interest relates, she says, to Indigenous and first peoples’ use of this simple form of transport, which was often carved from a single tree trunk.

Natural materials have always played a role in Saar’s work, alongside human-made found objects. The canoe in “Drifting Toward Twilight” is a wooden sporting model, built in Maine in the 1940s and shipped to the artist from a seller in Florida. Saar has customised it with two gnarled cypress “knees” (lumps that sometimes grow from the tree’s roots) which suggest the profile of a Viking longship, or a galleon with a carved figurehead on its prow.

The commission has additional personal resonance for her: as a girl, she lived in Pasadena, not far from the Huntington, and she remembers visiting the mansion and the gardens with her mother when she was about 13. Today, Saar’s granddaughter Sóla Saar Agustsson works at the institution; she was instrumental in bringing this project to fruition, serving as co-curator with Yinshi Lerman-Tan, the Huntington’s associate curator of American art.

Aside from dugout canoes and slave ships, the other kind of boat that “Drifting Toward Twilight” unavoidably suggests is the ferry that transfers souls between the realm of the living and the afterlife. At 97, Saar has remarkable reserves of energy and mental acuity, but she concedes that she will probably not tackle another installation of this scale and ambition.

For now, though, she is already planning her next projects. Shortly before my visit, she had been beachcombing on the California coast, north of Santa Barbara, and brought home several twisted pieces of driftwood that she was thinking of transforming into snakes: “I just love the idea of finding something and turning it around and making it into art.”

To November 2025, huntington.org

BN Goswamy at the Jaipur Literature Fest (Photo via X / @DalrympleWill)

One of India’s greatest art historians and critics, BN Goswamy, passed away on Friday morning in Chandigarh. Author of over 25 books on art, history and culture, Goswamy, 90, was considered the world’s foremost scholar of Indian miniature paintings. His notable works include Nainsukh of Guler: A Great Indian Painter from a Small Hill-State (1999), Essence of Indian Art (1986), The Spirit of Indian Painting: Close Encounters with 100 Great Works 1100-1900 (2014) and most recently, The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs (2023).

The most important strand of his work involves the Pahari paintings of the early-17th to mid-19th centuries. These are largely miniature paintings from the lower Himalayan hill kingdoms and the plains of Punjab, covering kingdoms like Nurpur, Kangra, Guler and so on. In his 1968 essay, “Pahar Painting: The Family as the Basis of Style”, Goswamy demonstrated how the Pahari artists differed from the Mughal court artists in one very important aspect—even though the Mughal court would sometimes have both father and son working for the same benefactor, the style would not be guided or decided by the family. However, in the case of Pahari art, as Goswamy demonstrated, one can clearly trace the elements of a ‘familial’ style among painters from various centres.

Tracing these artistic genealogies, Goswamy was also able to highlight mini-patterns and divergences. For example, let’s say you have a family or a clan of artists from Guler, led by one master artist (like Nainsukh). But as the clan grows, there are cousins and nephews and entire branches of the family tree that decide to try their luck elsewhere. Perhaps their own kingdom had an insufficient number of economic opportunities. Perhaps they heard that the king of a neighbouring kingdom was extremely generous when it came to rewarding artists. These economy-led migrations result in different familial styles interacting with each other, with the resulting changes seen in artworks across the next 5-6 decades, across generations.

Goswamy’s research becomes even more impressive when you consider that very little of medieval Pahari art survives in situ. Unlike, say, Rajasthani miniature paintings, there are no palaces or havelis today where Pahari art survives in its intended venue and is displayed in a manner befitting its stature. As Goswamy said in an interview with Ananya Vajpeyi once, Pahari art isn’t a “living tradition” in that sense and therefore presented a greater challenge for the scholar and the archivist.

Goswamy’s scholarship was every bit as thorough and enlightening about other Indian artistic traditions as well. In his 2006 book I See No Stranger: Early Sikh Art and Devotion, he outlined how core Sikh beliefs — accepting a singular, indivisible God, rejecting excessive rituals, superstition, inequality and societal oppression — are manifested in Sikh devotional art from the 16th through to the 19th century, whether it’s in paintings, textile work, or metal sculptures. That Goswamy was able to be so versatile and all-encompassing in his practice was down to his solid grasp of Indian philosophy, especially the concept of the rasa which he believed was crucial to a holistic understanding of this country and its cultural/artistic traditions.

In his book The Essence of Indian Art (1968), Goswamy wrote about rasa and what the term meant to him in great detail. Apart from the word’s primary and secondary meanings (the juice/sap of a plant, the essence or most important part of something), Goswamy said that for the philosopher, these two meanings led up to what he called the term’s “tertiary meaning”; which is to say a sense of heightened delight.

“In its final and subtlest sense, however (…) rasa comes to signify a state of heightened delight, in the sense of ananda, the kind of bliss that can be experienced only by the spirit. As later writers such as Vishwanatha, fourteenth century author of the Sahitya Darpana, a celebrated work on poetics, say: rasa is an experience akin to ultimate reality, ‘twin brother to the tasting of Brahma’. In Vishwanatha, the very definition of poetry involves invoking the word rasa. His dictum is often quoted: ‘Poetry is a sentence the soul of which is rasa.’”

Last month, Aleph had published his latest work, a whimsical and delightful book called The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry and Proverbs. A wide-ranging, multidisciplinary work that involved both art scholarship and literary criticism, this book traced instances of feline symbolism in Indian art, literature and culture-at-large. Goswamy wrote, “Great poets like Mir and Ghalib loved their cats to distraction; the poet Jibanananda Das saw himself in a cat that went here and there, following the Sun; Vikram Seth saw her as full of mischief and cleverness but no evil. In fact, on a daily basis, the feline is ‘addressed’ almost with affection.”

A regular at the Jaipur Literature Festival down the years, Goswamy had an unusually sweet and gentle voice, and an unhurried, dignified manner of public speaking. Those of us who had the good fortune of interacting with him at these gatherings remember his wit and wisdom, as well as his remarkable patience and generosity with his time. May he rest in peace.