Betye Saar made prints for a decade before moving into her signature technique of assemblage. “I was never a pure printmaker,” she admits. “I fooled around with all kinds of techniques.” It was Black Girl’s Window—a silhouetted self-portrait bearing cosmological signs—that marked her shift from print to sculpture. With that shift came Saar’s distinctive themes of space, mysticism, and, most importantly, what it means to be female and African-American in the U.S. —E.C.