Alison Saar’s rich body of work—including multimedia sculpture, installation, and works on paper—utilizes layered references to history, literature, and mythology to recount stories about Black life past and present. Based in Los Angeles, Saar was born and raised in Laurel Canyon in an artistic family. After receiving her B.A. (1978) in studio art and art history from Scripps College, Saar went on to earn her MFA (1981) from Otis-Parsons Institute (now Otis College of Art and Design).
At the beginning of her career, Saar was selected as a fellow of the studio program at The Studio Museum in Harlem (1982-3). She has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1984, 1985 and 1988), and was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1989, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists in 2000, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award in 1998 and the Joan Mitchell Artist in Residence in 2013. In 2012, the United States Artists Program named Saar one of 50 USA fellows. This year, Saar was awarded the the 2025 David C. Driskell Prize in recognition of her significant contributions to visual arts that honor and center African American experiences.
Saar was selected by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the City of Paris to produce Salon, a sculpture permanently placed in the French capital to honor the legacy of the Olympic and Paralympic Games Paris 2024. Other recent commissions include the monumental Soul Service Station at Desert X (Coachella Valley, CA), Tree Souls for the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park (Montgomery, AL), Little Big Sister at the Joslyn Museum of Art (Omaha, NE), and Bearing Witness at Destination Crenshaw (Los Angeles, CA). Recently she was chosen by the Obama Foundation as one of ten visionary artists, to create public art installations across the Obama Presidential Center’s campus in Chicago, Illinois.
Saar’s work has been featured in hundreds of solo and group exhibitions, and can be found in the prestigious private and public collections worldwide including that of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) (Los Angeles, CA), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY), National Gallery of Australia (Canberra, Australia), Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington D.C.), Whitney Museum of American Art (New York, NY), and the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation (Portland, OR), among many others.
