Betye Saar is a 93 year old artist I hadn’t heard of until reading about her in the New York Times Fall Preview. She is getting a lot of attention right now, with two major solo exhibitions this fall at MoMA and LACMA. Betye Saar’s sketchbooks play an important role in her work:

Everywhere she went, she carried small sketchbooks that did double duty as memory banks and portable studios. Many are repositories for quick, preliminary ballpoint pen studies for future assemblages. Others are filled with watercolor paintings that are polished creations in themselves. The show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, “Betye Saar: Call and Response,” which opens on Sept. 22, will reunite several sketchbooks with related finished works.

You can see other images of Betye Saar’s sketchbooks in this LA Weekly article, and if you can’t make it to the LACMA exhibition, this companion book should give a good overview: Betye Saar: Call and Response.