  About the Artwork
  
  
  Alison Saar creates life-size figures that emotionally embody what it means to be human. She explores desire, anxiety, aging, and loss in expressive sculptures based on her own body and informed by her own experiences. Her figures begin as a lumber beam, which she carves with a chain saw; sometimes, as in Blood/Sweat/Tears, she covers them in a copper skin. The grief expressed by this figure is palpable. She succumbs to her sorrow, hunching her shoulders and cradling her head in her hands. The rusted nails that secure the surface copper to the wooden core trace scar-like patterns all over her body. Droplets made of cast bronze—blood, sweat  and tears—cover her skin. Such expressions of grief and suffering are universally clear, but knowledge of  the recent death of Saar’s father Richard, a ceramicist and art conservator, adds a personal dimension to the title’s reference to arduous physical sacrifice.
 
From Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts 89 (2015)
  
  
  Title
  Blood/Sweat/Tears
  
  
  Artwork Date
  2005
  
  Artist
  Alison Saar
  
  
  
  Life Dates
  born 1956
  
  
  
  
  Nationality
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Definitions for nationality may vary significantly, depending on chronology and world events.
  Some definitions include:
  Belonging to a people having a common origin based on a geography and/or descent and/or tradition and/or culture and/or religion and/or language, or sharing membership in a legally defined nation.
  
  
  
  American
  
  
  
  Culture
  
  
  
  Please note:
  Cultures may be defined by the language, customs, religious beliefs, social norms, and material traits of a group.
  
  
  
  
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  Medium
  Wood, copper, bronze, paint and tar
  
  
  Dimensions
  Overall: 72 × 24 × 20 inches (182.9 × 61 × 50.8 cm)
  
  
  Classification
  Sculpture
  
  
  Department
  African American Art
  
  
  Credit
  Museum Purchase, W. Hawkins Ferry Fund
  
  
  
  Accession Number
  
  
  
  This unique number is assigned to an individual artwork as part of the cataloguing process at the time of entry into the permanent collection.
  Most frequently, accession numbers begin with the year in which the artwork entered the museum’s holdings.
  For example, 2008.3 refers to the year of acquisition and notes that it was the 3rd of that year. The DIA has a few additional systems—no longer assigned—that identify specific donors or museum patronage groups.
  
  
  
  2011.2
  
  
  Copyright
  Restricted
