“Weight converged with the news and my own personal experience,” Saar says in a phone interview from her home in Los Angeles. “I’d done a show called ‘Still…’ that was a response to all of the hatred, especially now that all of that is so easily accessible on the internet and social media. It got me angry and discouraged and frightened. So I had started creating pieces that were a response to that. Obama’s election opened up this whole flood [of racism]. Weight was really a response to working at this art [in a] high school, and these students were really phenomenal. Many of them got scholarships, but they couldn’t do it because they didn’t have the money, or they had to help support their family. This was a high school that works with lower-income families in downtown Los Angeles. It broke my heart that they’re still expected to be housekeepers like their mothers or laborers like their fathers. We think we’ve moved beyond that, and we haven’t." 

Read a recent SF Weekly review of Alison Saar’s exhibition at Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), on view through April 3, 2016.

IMAGE: Alison Saar, Weight, 2012, wood, rope, cotton scale and miscellaneous objects, 72 x 78 x 24 in. (182.9 x 198.1 x 61 cm)