Beyte Saar was born in 1926 in Los Angeles, and moved to Pasadena in her early years. Saar earned her degree in interior design at UCLA in 1949. The artist has been known to call herself a maker of objects, working with assemblage and collage. Saar finds inspiration in places such as flea markets and antique shops to help spark ideas for her art. Her work is grounded in the belief that overlooked or ordinary objects can be redefined and given new stories and meanings that evoke memory, spirituality, history, and identity. Her work discusses themes of race, oppression, transformation and reclamation. In many of her works she takes derogatory imagery and challenges racism, changes the narrative, and gives power to people who have been marginalized. Her works uses symbolic objects such as ships, clocks and black birds to signify topics such as the transatlantic slave trade, time, racism, and segregation, to name a few.
Seen as a pioneer of second-wave feminist and post-war black nationalist aesthetics, Saar's work has been shown in major exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and internationally at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art and the Museum Het Domein in the Netherlands. She has received honors including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the MOCA Distinguished Women in the Arts Award, with her art in institutions such as MoMA, LACMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. In 2016, the Betye Saar Catalogue Raisonné Project was created to document and preserve the artist's work.