A female figure balances on the ridge of a catfish, clutching a sickle and a conch—symbols of enslavement and rebellion. Her lips are blue referencing the Yoruba sea goddess, Yemaya.

Alison Saar’s work reinterprets Thomas Stothard’s eighteenth-century print, The Voyage of the Sable Venus, From Angola to the West Indies, itself inspired by Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Unlike those earlier works, Saar’s Sable Venus transforms these images into a powerful and spiritually charged warrior embodying feminine fertility and environmental renewal.