CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/18/2020

Inequities and shared humanity in the prints of Alison Saar

"High Cotton" (2017) is reproduced from Mirror, Mirror: The Prints of Alison Saar, collecting works from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. "From celebrating blackness and black empowerment to depicting instances of self-imposed constraints and some of the worst crimes of racism, Saar’s work reckons with us," Weatherspoon Art Museum Director Nancy Doll writes. "It justly and importantly reminds us of the past and present inequities that people of color endure. It tugs at both our heartstrings and our moral compasses and calls upon us to examine our own biases in order to develop the kind of empathy necessary to right our wrongs. In One Writer’s Beginnings, Eudora Welty wrote: 'The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives—the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead.' These sentences could not more aptly describe Alison Saar’s artistic practice or intention. Expansion from the individual to the universal lodges at the very heart of her work: the sense of shared humanity, that we are equals under the skin."