Alison Saar
To Sit A While
About
"Don’t get up. Just sit a while and think. Never be afraid to sit a while and think." — Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Hansberry was a playwright, journalist, and activist. Her play A Raisin in the Sun was the first play by a Black woman produced on Broadway and has been revived on Broadway in 2004 and 2014. Generations of Black theater, television and film artists were inspired by and cut their artistic teeth on her masterpiece.
In 2022, the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative launched a national tour of a sculpture of Hansberry’s likeness by Los Angeles-based artist, Alison Saar, and a unique scholarship to cover not the tuition, but the living expenses of women and non-binary BIPOC dramatic writers in graduate school to give them time to actually, write.
Alison Saar’s work, To Sit A While, features the figure of Hansberry surrounded by five bronze chairs, each representing a different aspect of her life and work. The life-size chairs are an invitation to the public to do just that: to sit with her and think.
The sculpture of Hansberry will be on view at MoAD April 5th - April 30th, 2023.
Made possible by
The Lorraine Hansberry Initiative is a project of The Lillys, an organization dedicated to women in theater.
To learn more about the sculpture and the Lorraine Hansberry Initiative, visit https://lorrainehansberryinitiative.org/.
