[1] Her work is considered highly political, as she challenged negative ideas about African Americans throughout her career; Saar is best known for her artwork that critiques anti-Black racism in the United States.

[3] After her father's death in 1931, Saar and her mother, brother, and sister moved in with her paternal grandmother, Irene Hannah Maze, in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles.

The family then moved to Pasadena, California, to live with Saar's maternal great-aunt Hatte Parson Keys and her husband Robert E.

Saar said that she was "fascinated by the materials that Simon Rodia used, the broken dishes, sea shells, rusty tools, even corn cobs—all pressed into cement to create spires.

"[13] In oral history interviews, Saar later recalled seeing extensive African, Oceanic and Egyptian art on a visit to the Field Museum in Chicago as being "an important step in my development as an artist ...

In the bottom of the jewelry box there is a metal cross on the right side, a red leather wallet in the middle, on top is an image of child, and on the left there are sewing materials.

Saar's work resisted the artistic style of primitivism, as well as the white feminist movement that refused to address issues of race.

Above her head are nine smaller window panes arranged three by three, which display various symbols and images, including moons and stars, a howling wolf, a sketched skeleton, an eagle with the word "love" across its chest, and a tintype woman.

In the 1960s, Saar began collecting images of Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Little Black Sambo, and other stereotyped African American figures from folk culture and advertising of the Jim Crow era.

In this mixed-media assemblage, Saar utilized the stereotypical mammy figure of Aunt Jemima to subvert traditional notions of race and gender.

The Aunt Jemima sculpture holds a broom and a rifle, subverting her happy servant and caregiver stereotype by way of a militant alter ego who demands her own agency and power.

A large, clenched fist, echoing the Black power symbol, is collaged over and partially obscuring the Mammy photograph, recognizing the aggressive and radical means used by African American activists in the 1970s to fight for their rights.

Three years later, she produced a series of more than twenty pieces that, in her own words, "exploded the myth" of such imagery, beginning with her seminal portrait of Aunt Jemima.

She arranged old photographs, letters, lockets, dried flowers, and handkerchiefs in shrine-like boxes to suggest memory, loss, and the passage of time.

This assemblage piece caused many Los Angeles-based artists of color to see the straw and beads as a way to explore an organic and even mysterious sense of Blackness.

Through the pairing of computer chips with mystical amulets and charms, these monumental constructions suggested the need for an alliance of both systems of knowledge: the technical and the spiritual.

The Woman's Art Journal states: "African American artists as diverse as Betye Saar reclaim and explore their identity.

[31] In her 2016 article "Influences" for Frieze magazine, Saar explains directly about some of her artistic choices in the piece: "I found a little Aunt Jemima mammy figure, a caricature of a Black slave, like those later used to advertise pancakes.

"[33] In the work, which was originally inspired by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,[11] she wanted to promote support for political independence and break stereotypes used to describe Black women.

In "The Women's Art Journal Betye Saar: Extending the Frozen Monument", James Cristen Steward states: "Against the backdrop of pancake packaging is a grinning popped-eye 'Mammy" with a broom in one hand and a rifle in the other.

In the foreground, another vintage caricature of a jaunty, almost flirtatious Mammy, one arm balancing a willing white child against her corset hourglass waste [sic] she simply allows the derogatory images to speak for themselves".

Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, Saar began to work with the racist images of Black individuals that had become so popular in American culture.

Saar decided to compile such images into a film that was based on the song from the musical Hair called Colored Spade, which contains a list of derogatory terms for African Americans.

The film depicts a montage of caricatured images from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century culture, such as sheet music, comics, and food containers.

This was likely the first contemporary African American women's exhibition in California, and included watercolorist Sue Irons, printmaker Yvonne Cole Meo, painter Suzanne Jackson, pop artist Eileen Abdulrashid, Gloria Bohanon, and Saar.

[38] Walker's controversial works included Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as it Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart (1994), and The End of Uncle Tom and Grand Allegorical Tableau of Eva in Heaven (1995).

[40] Other critics, such as Saar and Howardena Pindell, disagreed with Walker's approach and believed the artist was reinforcing racism and racist stereotypes of African American life.

In an NPR Radio interview, Saar stated, "... the work of Kara Walker was sort of revolting and negative and a form of betrayal to the slaves, particularly women and children, and that it was basically for the amusement and the investment of the white art establishment".