In Honor of Artist Alison Saar
and SJMA Visionary Award Honoree Adobe Foundation
Saturday, April 25, 5:30pm–midnight
Art + Cocktails • Dinner + Auction • Music + Dancing
SJMA Visionary Award Honoree
Adobe Foundation
The Adobe Foundation creates positive change through support for creative and digital literacy, social equity and opportunity, and active engagement in the communities where they live and work. The Adobe Foundation is a private foundation created and funded by Adobe Inc.
Artist Honoree
Alison Saar
Alison Saar’s artistic practice is a material and spiritual reclamation that invokes the past in order to reconsider the present and future.
Best known for her sculpture and printmaking, Saar (b. 1956, Los Angeles, California) masterfully wields found materials to physically reposition and recontextualize the histories, mythologies, and folklore of a global range of communities, particularly the African diaspora and Indigenous peoples. Saar’s representational approach uses the figure as a metaphoric vehicle to bridge the historic and contemporary, the personal and universal. Saar delves deeply and vulnerably into her subjects, exploring key themes such as race and identity, womanhood and motherhood, and spirituality and the body.
Saar was born in Laurel Canyon and raised in a constant state of creative exploration by the accomplished artists Betye and Richard Saar. Saar received her BA in studio art and art history from Scripps College (Claremont, California) and her MFA from Otis-Parsons Institute (Los Angeles), now Otis College of Art and Design.
Renowned for her monumental sculptures, Saar has been commissioned for public works around the world. In 2024, she was selected by the International Olympic Committee and the City of Paris to create a sculpture honoring the legacy of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. She is also developing a major new work titled Torch Song for the Obama Presidential Center, which opens in Spring of this year. The cast bronze figure is inspired by the Statue of Liberty and by Chicago’s blues heritage.
Saar has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the 2025 David C. Driskell Prize, which recognizes her enduring impact on African American art. Her work is represented in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), the High Museum of Art (Atlanta, Georgia), the Art Institute of Chicago (Illinois), the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, DC), the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), the National Gallery of Australia (Parkes), San José Museum of Art, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park (Montgomery, Alabama).