Alison Saar

It does.

And that rooting continues in the Women's Garden with Alison Saar's bronze statue Torch Song.

This one is so cool.

It's a bronze statue inspired by the Statue of Liberty, but entirely recontextualized.

There's sculptures that are outside in the garden.

I would call out particularly, there's a bronze statue by an artist named Alison Saar that's inspired by the Statue of Liberty, but it's sort of this I'll link to it in the show notes.

It's a bit hard to describe.

It's in an area called the Women's Garden that's celebrating the accomplishments and history of women.

[audience clapping] And, uh, and Betye Saar has made this incredible piece at the Studio Museum in Harlem called Indigo Mercy Blues, and you can see it when you go to Studio.

And then there's this amazing piece in our book called Diva by Alison Saar.

I think it was shown years ago at the Hirshhorn, and it's just one of these powerful pieces.

So I was thinking about Indigo Mercy Blues, I was thinking about Diva, and, and I wrote a blues.

Um, I also made a concerted effort to, um, for, for some of the sections, particularly the last section on the color brown, to, to have, um, to have some contemporary artists, um, that I could, that I could use as, as gauges for, um, for how this, this, this conundrum of a color works.

And so in the lectures, I think I parked on Nina Chanel Abney and, um, Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, but in the book, I had to include Henry Taylor [laughs] because I had seen his fantastic show at the, um, the, the, the Contemporary Art Museum in LA, and I was just...

And I remember Alison Saar saying, "This guy's a painter.

You gotta really see this guy's work," you know? And, uh, when I saw his paintings and I saw how he used the, the, the medium to kind of m- map out and build out the figures that he knows or the people that he imagined, that, that, that brown was imbricated in, in such a way that, that, that I just, I needed to add that to the story that I didn't have in it before.