A musically inclined memory

Art often makes easy connections, jumping the synapses among memory, experience and intention. Betye Saar, known for her politically charged assemblage art, understands that as well as anyone. When she was asked to donate her services to “Artful Violins,” a Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra project, she knew immediately what she wanted to conjure.

The orchestra asked six Los Angeles artists to transform real violins -- donated by local shops or makers -- into artworks to be publicly displayed for two months and then auctioned to raise money for the orchestra at a gala Jan. 25. While some artists decided to physically alter the instrument (Michael C. McMillen and Roy Dowell), Saar decided to keep hers intact -- theoretically it’s still playable -- and to embellish it with her own musical associations.

“Right away my brain said, ‘What about that great photo of my great-uncle’s?’ ” says Saar, pointing to the finished violin, lying on a stool in her modern split-level, sunlight-infused Laurel Canyon studio. “I was really enthralled with this photograph.”

A copy has been laminated onto the back of the instrument and features seven black musicians, formally posing in the garden of the Libya, an elegant Harlem restaurant her great-uncle Robert Keys opened in 1913 and ran for about two decades. Saar never saw the restaurant, only heard about it, and inherited the original photograph when her great-aunt died in 1979.

Five nattily dressed men hold their instruments -- bass, clarinet, trumpet, cello and violin. The two women in the picture, in ankle-length dresses, “probably played the piano and sang,” Saar suggests.

Besides the family connection, she likes what the photograph might convey to anyone looking at it. “This was a classy act, this was a classy kind of place too,” she says. “I think it’s important for people to know that African Americans did have some class -- they still do, of course. This makes a statement just from the way they’re dressed.”

Once she said yes to the project, Saar was given a choice of three violins, and she chose one with honey-colored wood. “I love the color of it,” she says, her finger tracing the rim, “and I love this little trim that goes around it.”

The trim is the purfling, a thin, double line of ebony inlay that reinforces the edges of the violin, but for Saar, it visually helps to frame her subject.

Within that frame, the orchestra covers most of the violin’s back surface. Saar has added some leaf shapes made of paper to emphasize the photograph’s garden setting, and then given everything a sienna-toned wash. On one end she has attached a metal fleur-de-lis and, above the musicians, a new moon made of copper.

“This little crescent moon is one of the images I like to use, for hope or promise,” she says. “It’s the new moon in the sky.” Finally, the neck of the violin has been neatly covered with the tooled leather spine from an old book -- Saar just felt it fit there.

Until the gala, all the violins -- by the six selected artists (the other three are Linda Nishio, Frank Romero and Erika Rothenberg) and by Sarah Yates, the LACO associate who thought up the project -- will be on view at the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s offices or at galleries throughout Los Angeles, including L.A. Louver, Margo Leavin and Rosamund Felsen Gallery. Saar’s will be at Jan Baum Gallery on La Brea. For details: (213) 622-7001, Ext. 221. or www.laco.org