Betye Saar, who died Sunday in Los Angeles at 99, spent a lifetime teaching the world that the most degrading objects of a culture carry within them the seeds of their own undoing. Working in assemblage across more than five decades, she gathered the cast-off imagery of American racism — the mammy, the caricature, the branded stereotype — and remade it into art that refused, resisted, and reclaimed. Her 1972 'Liberation of Aunt Jemima' stands as one of the defining gestures of postwar American art: a quiet, devastating proof that inherited images are not destiny, but raw material.