[MUSIC PLAYING] I am a person who walks looking down, because you can find lots of great things on the ground. I’m basically a recycler. You know, I find other people’s stuff and junk and recycle it into my stuff and junk. I can’t pass a yard sale. Action. Is that the word? Yeah, action. I come from a household where my mother was very artistic. In her era, women made quilts. They crocheted. They did things with their hands. Women were not particularly encouraged to be artists, especially women of color, so design was my choice at school. Through the years, I shifted into other kinds of art. My favorite probably is collage and assemblage, where I mix up materials, objects, ideas. Sometimes they tell a story, and sometimes they don’t. I prefer it when they don’t tell a story, so the viewer can invent their own story. I rarely look for a specific thing. I just kind of spot. I kind of go by my intuition. I can tell when a fan has something for me that I might use. At that time, there were very few black artists in Los Angeles. There was a larger community, a national community. They were having a conference in Chicago. So David Hammons and I decided that we wanted to go. During our spare time we went to the Field Museum. African art, oceanic art, primitive art, and folk art were not really considered art, so they were down in the basement. And it was weird down there, because it was all this energy from these tribal kinds of materials. When we came back to California, that was when I started doing the ancestral cast pieces, working with objects from Africa and organic things. When you know Betye and you start to really look into her work, you’d think that she escaped from one of the pyramids or something, you know what I mean? She’s just into a strong mystical quality. I was always interested in alternative beliefs, palmistry and phonology, astrology, and so forth. In the ’60s, I became more interested in what was happening about feminism and racism. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., his murder was something that was really horrific for me and shocking. I remember how I felt physically, just really angry and upset. But I was a mother with young children. I couldn’t walk in protest. But I did have a weapon. And that was art. That was when I started using black derogatory images. I did this piece called ‘The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,’ because it went back to how black people were thought of as comical, or caricatures, or animals. And I wanted to do something to show my protest for that, so I made Aunt Jemima as a warrior, as a fighter. She has a rifle and a hand grenade. She’s taking care of business. I was really hesitant about putting that figure up there. Some people thought it was humorous. But it did something that I didn’t know it would do. It made people think. It’s been forever. Racism hasn’t gone away. Has sexism gone away? No. So you still have to keep repeating things. My daughter found this scale for me — the weight of racism or so forth. I will probably paint the outside of it green and the inside red, so it looks like they’re in a watermelon. That’s my sense of humor. This sounds really gross. I applied for a National Endowment. And I received — I don’t know how many thousand. But when I got that check, I looked in the mirror, and I said, “Oh, Betye Saar. You’re really an artist.” Before I was just making stuff. I’ve been used to being a long admirer of hers for a long time. And suddenly, everywhere I go, people talk about her work. We’re in a culture that likes objects. You’re attracted maybe to beauty, or to usefulness. Or there’s other objects that you look and you’re disgusted with them. Everything has a past, so I feel that that energy is somehow enclosed with the object. What do I have now that’s new? Antlers. That’s my latest thing. Antlers. It’s always a puzzlement when I start collecting things. Like, “What can I do with this? I mean, what’s the point of that?” And then I’ll find another component and it says, “Oh, yeah. I can use it here.” It’s a very selfish reason that I make art. Because I like doing it. I’m in my 90s now. And all these pieces are sitting around waiting for me to put them together. And time is the biggest challenge. To find time to do it. I do have a birthday coming up. I’m a Leo. It means that I am like the lion. It’s best you not hear me roar. And that’s a wrap.