Betye Saar began her career in the wake of the Black Panter Party and the second wave Feminist movement, contextualizing her work within a pivotal moment of modern history. This was also a time when art’s own definition was shifting. The role of the artist and their use of mediums became much more fluid with the emergence of new practices like performance art and assemblage. Saar began her artistic practice in printmaking in the late 1950s, but was most known for her assemblages, where she would empower everyday objects with a political force that could recenter key narratives surrounding race. By the late 1960s, she merged her skills as an art designer, seamstress, and printmaker to form her unique visual language, which she ultimately employed as a tool to understand how and why we mythologize the Black woman.
Natural elements have always been prevalent in Betye Saar’s work as early as her monumental 1969 assemblage, Black Girl’s Window, which is embellished with moon and stars imagery. Rather than dream-like cosmological elements, The Heat of Fire imagines the environmental elements in a much more visceral way. Like the woven paper used in Saar’s The Sound of Water print, the paper she uses here is also meant to resemble more organic, natural materials and processes. The bottom of the print is rigidly torn, accompanied by dark brush strokes that exaggerate these tears, possibly to resemble burn marks. More than material, though, the physicality of this series is best understood through the figures they portray.
This print is a part of Saar’s 1999 element series, which expands on her 1988 non-embodied element series made on silk banners. The figures in this series are embodiments of the earthly elements, personifying them through a female lens. With The Heat of Fire, Saar’s figure is portrayed fiercely. Consumed in a sea of flames, it is difficult to discern whether the figure is subject to or in control of the fire, reflecting the second wave Feminist belief that women’s work is subverted, overlooked, or hidden. Saar embellished this figure’s stereotypically feminine features with flames, her hair, chest, and pelvis, reminding the viewer of women’s vulnerable yet intrinsic role within nature. While her eyes are closed, she maintains an assertive expression as she bares a metaphysical torch, indicating her agency in the scene. Either reclined or in motion, this diagonally oriented figure is embracing these flames, and by extension, herself and her own elemental role in the world.
