Eshu (The Trickster)

Eshu (The Trickster) was inspired by a trip that Betye Saar took in 1970 to Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History with friend and fellow artist David Hammons. Impressed with the multitude of African objects she encountered, Saar returned home to start a new series of what she referred to as “ritual pieces.” To create this assemblage, Saar adhered fabric to a found leather support. “When I saw the main shape,” Saar reflected, “I knew I wanted to create a body.” She traced the contours of her own hands and feet in paint onto the surface to conjure an abstract version of Eshu, the trickster god of the Yoruba people of West Africa, who lends his name to the piece. By integrating her own body, Saar claimed her role as “a medium, the connection between the material and the message.”

Saar began her career as a printmaker in Los Angeles in the 1960s, incorporating metaphysical elements from a wide range of sources including phrenology, palm reading, and astrology. In the 1970s she started to incorporate imagery from Africa and the African diaspora, creating iconic works such as her assemblage The Liberation of Aunt Jemima (1972; Berkeley Art Museum) that appropriated racially offensive characters of the Jim Crow era to evoke and debunk stereotypes associated with blackness.