Betye Saar - Keepin' It Clean

Keepin’ It Clean is a survey of Betye Saar’s washboard assemblages, a significant series she began in 1997. For Saar, the washboard is an incredibly potent object, symbolizing the intersection of race, gender, class, and labor in the United States; it is an emblem of America’s unresolved legacy of slave labor and the systems of racial oppression that continue to afflict the country. Throughout her career, Saar has worked to expose the history of these oppressive systems and the ongoing racial stereotypes they perpetuate. Saar continues to ask, “America, will you ever clean up your act?”

This was the catalog for Betye Saar's exhibition Keepin' It Clean, at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, now Craft Contemporary from May 28 to August 20, 2017.

• Foreward by Suzanne Isken, Executive Director
• Introduction by Holly Jerger, Exhibitions Curator
• Essay, Bettye Saar: Extreme Times Call for Extreme Heroines, by Steven Nelson

Steven Nelson served as Professor of African and African American Art for two decades before leaving UCLA to serve as the Dean of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. In addition to his work teaching and advising as part of the art history faculty, Nelson also served as director of the UCLA African Studies Center, advised on UCLA’s diversity and inclusion strategic planning, chaired the UCLA Graduate Council from 2009-11, and held numerous leadership, guest faculty, and fellowship positions outside of the university. His publications include the award-winning From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa (University of Chicago Press, 2007), and the forthcoming Structural Adjustment: Mapping, Geography, and the Visual Cultures of Blackness and On the Underground Railroad. 

Craft and Folk Art Museum, 2017, softcover, 8 x 11.5 in, 50 pages.