Betye Saar, influential assemblage artist who ‘liberated’ Aunt Jemima, dies at 99

Saar leapt into fine art on seeing an exhibition of assemblages by Joseph Cornell. Soon enough she was scouring garage sales for objects with “a certain energy” that she could use in her shoe box sized assemblages. Often, they addressed political themes, most famously those where she included (and ridiculed) Black mammy figures that represented…