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 artistic designer, seamstress, and printmaker to form her unique artistic language, which she ultimately employed as a tool to understand how and why we mythologize the Black woman.
By integrating an experimentation in monoprints with the caricaturized subject matter integral to Saar’s work, The Sound of Water converges many important facets of her career. It is part of a 1999 element series that personifies the four main elements of nature with the female body and expands on her 1988 non-embodied element series made on silk banners. With its deckled edges and texture from luscious layers of ink, the wove paper resembles cloth, a material that has been present in Saar’s work for decades. For her, cloth represents women’s labor as a historically overlooked source of creative ingenuity, as well as disposability and change. Her first major work, Black Girls Window, was made thirty years prior to The Sound of Water and serves as a starting point for her recurring silhouetted motif. In this early work, the figure’s only visible features are her eyes, which assert a striking force towards the viewer. In The Sound of Water, the seemingly anonymous figure is also only distinguished features are her eyes, although now they are gazing up, possibly with hope for a better future. Using printmaking and a textile affect—two practices both perceived as second class in fine art—to portray a caricaturized, black female body is Saar’s way to assert her voice in the feminist discussion on women’s oppression.
