LEZLEY SAAR

‘How the wanderings of the tiniest floating islands came to the mother of waters (2017)’, will be on display from her ‘Gender Renaissance’ series. The work is a portrait of a trans woman that she imagined from the early 1900s who seems to glide into frame under a full moon, on top of a melting glacial ice shelf. Painted upon patterned fabric backgrounds reminiscent of Victorian wall coverings, the entire series reexamined conceptions of gender, race, and colorism from historic and imagined figures of the 19th Century.

Lezley Saar is a mixed-media artist and painter. Her artwork deals with themes of identity, race, gender, beauty, normalcy, and sanity. She has exhibited internationally, and nationally, and her work is included in museum collections such as The Kemper Museum, CAAM, The Auckland Art Museum, and MOCA. Born in Los Angeles to artist parents. Her mother Bettye Saar is an African American assemblage artist and her father Richard Saar, was a ceramist and art restorer. Themes of race, gender, neurology, and sexuality are all longstanding concerns in Saar’s work. Her paintings and tapestries often address the power of conjuring one’s reality and finding truth in the surreal as well as mining the language and symbols of owns own personal history to create meaningful objects and visual iconography.