Photo credit: Fred Mauviel, courtesy City of Paris
In a feature by Culture Type, celebrated sculptor and printmaker Alison Saar ’78 discusses the vision behind Salon, her sculpture for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics.
The multi-piece artwork depicts a larger-than-life Black woman extending a golden flame in one hand and grasping olive branches in the other. She is encircled by chair designs representative of West Africa, Central America, China, and Europe, which visitors can use to become part of the tableau. According to the President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach, the nontraditional monument is “an invitation to take a seat and reflect on the beauty of diversity of humankind.”
Salon is Saar’s first international commission and one in a series of original works the IOC has ordered from artists for Olympic host cities. Saar depicted a woman of African descent to honor the large African population in France and the contributions of colonized and enslaved people across the globe.
This sentiment echoes across Saar’s past tributes, including the sculpture of Harriet Tubman she donated to Scripps College in 2010. That sculpture was a smaller version of Saar’s massive Tubman statue in New York—the city’s first public monument to a Black woman.
For the next Olympics-inspired art piece, Saar will pass the torch to her hometown of Los Angeles, which will host the 2028 games. Click here to watch a video about Salon.