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In conjuction with the Dedication Ceremony for Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial by Alison Saar which took place in Harlem on November 13th, the Phyllis Kind Gallery is honored to open a solo exhibition of Alison Saar's work dating from 1987 to 2007.

Alison Saar's ongoing body of sculpted wood, found-object figures, drawing and prints evoke the African diaspora, drawing from African and Haitian folklore, contemporary African-American culture, Catholicism, Santeria, Vodun, and Classical mythology. Her focus remains the African-American female experience.

El Bato Loco, 1987, the earliest piece in the exhibition, is a large fabric banner (61 x 32 inches) which depicts a shirtless male figure, rendered in glass beads, holding a spirit bottle in one hand and a snake in the other surrounded by symbols in sequins referencing Haitian voudon flags.

Spade's a Spade, 2001 are six portraits of black men painted on shovels named Shuggie, Isaiah, Rydell, Malcolm, JJ and Ty.

Counterpoint to Spade's a Spade, is a skillet study: Josaphine, 1999 which is from a series of cast iron frying pans painted with portraits of female domestic workers.

Alison has long been intrigued with hair as a signifier. Mammy's Whamny, 2003 is a small baby's night gown knitted from gray and black African-American hair. Conked, 1997 a woodcut print refers to a process to straighten hair.

Bottom Line, 2001 is a drawing of a line up of naked women's behinds, skinny, voluptuous, muscular, fat, lean and Rubenesque. The work looks clinically at the variety of female forms.

J'attends, 2007 is a carved prone head covered with a skin of pressed ceiling tin and copper with hollow eyes. When one peers inside her eyes, a small bare light bulb illuminates an interior swarmed by moths.

Three mixed media large-scale collages from 2007 (61 x 31 inches) are also on view. Each one is named for a lunar sea poetically named by Galileo.

Sea of Serenity plays on the notion that the moon can induce lunacy. Sprouting from the female figure's abdomen in Sea of Fecundity are cascading roots, which end with withered potatoes. Alluding to the Great potato famine in Ireland, the piece speaks of fallow ground, blight and the end of fertility. Sea of Nectar depicts a woman with milky roots spilling from her breast.

A bronze maquette of Swing Low: Harriet Tubman Memorial has been forged in an edition of nine — a few are still available. It's as strident and powerful as the larger than life sculpture though it measures 23 x 15 x 26 inches.

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Cultural Affairs Commissioner Kate D. Levin joined Parks & Recreation Commissioner Adrian Benepe, former Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, Congressman Charles Rangel, and Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Curator Christopher Moore to dedicate a memorial sculpture of Harriet Tubman in Harlem. The memorial, commissioned through the Department of Cultural Affairs' Percent for Art program, was created by the renowned sculptor Alison Saar.

Harriet Tubman is depicted not as the conductor of the Underground Railroad but as the train itself. She appears as an unstoppable locomotive that worked towards improving the lives of slaves for most of her 93 years of life.

As a cast bronze sculpture reaching over 13 feet tall and 14 feet long, Tubman is shown coming on full steam, the ruffle of her petticoat acting as a cattle guard pushing all resistance aside. Trailing behind her skirt are roots being torn up from the ground which symbolize both the pulling up of roots by the slaves that had to leave all behind, and Tubman's uprooting of the slavery system itself.

Saar designed stylized portraits of "anonymous passengers" of the Underground Railroad which press through the fabrics of Tubman's skirt: some of which were inspired by West African "passport masks". It's also embellished with worn shoe soles, roots, cowry shells and other items that would have been carried to the North. Why is she facing South? »