Black Girl's Window

Betye Saar, 1969 · Gallery 408 · Floor 4

So this is the lady who gave Aunt Jemima a rifle. Betye Saar. She takes that little figurine with a broom in one hand and puts a rifle in the other. That’s 1972. The one she’s known for. This is three years earlier. Black Girl’s Window. And it’s an actual old window. Still has the hinges and the latch. She’s making prints when she finds it, and starts wondering how those prints would look inside the panes. Look along the top. Moons, a sun, stars. Things you might see through a window, except she’s put them in the window itself. Then she starts adding other pictures. Little objects. She’s moving from making prints to putting things together. Look at the figure down below. A girl’s silhouette, hands pressed against the glass. All those red and yellow signs across the palms. Moons and stars again. Astrology. They look like hands you’d show a fortune-teller. And watch the eyes when you move a little to the side. They seem to open and close. It’s one of those little pictures that changes with the angle. Like something you’d get as a prize in a cereal box. She calls the whole thing a diary. Stuff that already happened. See those two kids dancing? They’re cut from an old greeting card. Saar says that’s her mother and father. She’s still a little girl when her father gets an infection. The hospital in Pasadena is segregated, so he has to go to the county hospital. He doesn’t survive. She sees those skeletons as his death. Right beside the dancing couple. Her parents together, and then the loss of him. But there’s love in here too. See that eagle with LOVE across its chest? She said, “Love is a bird. It comes and goes. It flies away. It stays.” By the time she makes this, in 1969, her own marriage is ending. The Watts riots were four years earlier. She says both the personal and the political are in here. Now go back to the hands. Those moons and stars from the top row are on the palms too. Remember, she called this a diary. She doesn’t say which hand is which. She just says, “One hand is for what my life will be, and the other hand is what my life really was.”

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