saving the appearances
“She’s liberated! Finally at long last!” wrote the artist Betye Saar on her Instagram in June after Quaker Oats announced that it would be retiring the Aunt Jemima brand and logo. The pancake mix and syrup brand used the image of Nancy Green, an enslaved woman from Civil War-era Mount Sterling, Ky., in its advertising and product labels for more than 100 years. In an acknowledgment of the imagery’s origins and its perpetuation of a racial stereotype, the subsidiary of PepsiCo decided to finally drop it in order to “make progress towards racial equality.”
Saar has been advocating for the liberation of Aunt Jemima for nearly 50 years. She created the assemblage titled The Liberation of Aunt Jemima—one of her most famous and powerful works—for an exhibition at the Rainbow Sign Cultural Center in Berkeley, Calif., in 1972. The show’s curator, E.J. Montgomery, issued an open call for Black artists to contribute work about Black heroes. “The show was organized around community responses to the 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. assassination,” said Saar in a June 17 statement released through Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represents her. “This work allowed me to channel my righteous anger at not only the great loss of
