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 we 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 statement of material and spiritual reclamation that invokes the past as a means for reconsidering the present and future.
Best known for her sculpture and printmaking, Saar masterfully wields found materials to physically reposition and recontextualize the histories, mythologies and folklore of a global range of communities, especially related to the African diaspora and Indigenous peoples. Saar’s representational approach utilizes the figure as a primary metaphoric vehicle to bridge the historic and contemporary, as well as the personal and universal. Key themes, within which Saar delves deeply and vulnerably, include race and identity, womanhood and motherhood, and spirituality and the body.
Alison Saar was born in Laurel Canyon, California and raised in a constant state of creative exploration by the accomplished artists Betye and Richard Saar. Saar received her B.A. in studio art and art history from Scripps College, Claremont, California, and earned her MFA from Otis-Parsons Institute (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, a cast bronze figure inspired by the Statue of Liberty and Chicago’s blues heritage, for the Obama Presidential Center, opening in 2026.
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, the High Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Australia, and the Equal Justice Initiative’s Freedom Monument Sculpture Park.