Betye Saar dead: Assemblage artist ‘liberated’ Aunt Jemima
Betye Saar, a Los Angeles artist who reworked collections of bigoted bric-a-brac — Sambo dolls, ceramic mammies and crude renderings of pickaninnies — into potent works of assemblage that mined the searing historical past of race within the United States, and whose works influenced generations of artists, has died. She was 99. Saar died in…