The feminist movement has given me more professional exposure. But I resist that now, just like I resist exhibiting in African American artists' shows. I've always worked the same way, and haven't done anything I would consider "feminist art." --Betye Saar Yes, I am a feminist. I was involved with the Women's Space [Womanspace] here in Los Angeles. Feminism for me implies more like humanism, just accepting yourself and knowing that it's okay to be the way you are.... For me the ultimate goal is to be a whole person and to accept the outcome. --Betye Saar People aren't really ready to deal with fierce female passion. --Alison Saar

Betye Saar considers herself a feminist; however she resists designating her artwork as such. Similarly, Alison Saar, Betye's daughter, avoids labeling her own art as feminist. (1) Yet, both artists have helped to shape a feminist consciousness in the arts since the early 1970s through their probing constructions of autobiography, self-identity, family, and the female body: a consciousness circulating around the historical development of the African American female nude. Betye's early ideas of spirituality and ethnicity, shaped in the early 1970s, have germinated within her daughter, evidenced by Alison's bust--and full-length nude, non-white female figures of the 1980s and 1990s. The Saars' intergenerational explorations of race, history, and the black female body represent a crucial step to reclaim the contentious history surrounding the visual representation of African American women.

Contemporary scholarship often distinguishes Betye's era as the beginning of a reclamation project that has continued to flourish in the art of Alison and her contemporaries. Alison's sculptures reflect her mother's experiences and ideas, but they also form part of a continual, adaptive development of African American representations of the female nude that artists began in the first half of the twentieth century. Negotiations between the binaries of race and gender occurred in the arts much earlier than the 1960s and 1970s, the period when these issues received such great attention. Artists such as Eldzier Cortor and Rose Piper produced images during the 1940s that illuminate the constant contemporary problems related to women's control over their own bodies within social, racial, and sexual milieux. Thus, as a means of filling a missing link, this essay examines the generational conduit between mother and daughter. I argue that Alison's nudes are connected to her mother's autobiographical investigations and, moreover, that they form part of a larger historical struggle for self-identity articulated against and through models of the feminine, feminist, and maternal.

In recent years, scholars such as Judith Wilson, Michael D. Harris, Lisa Gail Collins, Michele Wallace, and Richard J. Powell have problematized the near virtual absence of African American depictions of black female nudes in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. They emphasize how this dearth of representations stemmed from certain factors: the black community promoting sensitive, realistic portraits; artists who feared being deemed improper or pornographers by middle-class society; and most prominently, contemporary scientific theory, which, linking black sexuality...