Not so long ago, the art world was enthralled by identity. Influential shows like the 1990 “Decade” show at the New Museum and the 1993 Whitney Biennial foregrounded artists’ gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity and race, setting off a scramble by artists to embrace some exotic ancestry or group identity in the service of artistic relevance. The cachet of Otherness persisted for several seasons before the art world moved on, glad to be rid of the dictates of “victim art,” political correctness and essentialism.

But if identity as an art style is passe, it remains a potent force in human behavior. As the day’s top news stories suggest, nationality, ethnicity, race and, increasingly, religion continue to serve as pretexts for political and social strife. In a world where riots break out over religious symbols and nations are torn apart over ethnic differences, fixed definitions of identity emerge as an obstacle, rather than a solution, to meeting the needs of marginalized groups striving for representation, power and influence. As a result, art that reinforces rigid categories is less helpful than art that presents a more fluid and hybrid model of identity.

“Family Legacies: The Art of Betye, Lezley, and Alison Saar,” an exhibition curated by Jessica Dallow and Barbara Matilsky for the Ackland Art Museum at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, provides a remarkably layered meditation on the complexities of identity. It presents the work of three prominent African-American women artists who are also members of the same immediate family. While kinship shows always offer interesting insights into the mysteries of familial influence and competition, this one is remarkably cohesive, revealing how an interweaving of personal and ancestral history, family inheritance and shared traditions has yielded three complementary but distinctive bodies of work. In the process, it demonstrates how rich a subject identity can be when it is approached as a tool for inquiry rather than an end in itself.

The story begins with Betye Saar, the family matriarch, whose ancestry is a mixture of African-American, Irish and Native American. Born Betye Irene Brown in 1926, she married Richard Saar, a white ceramist and conservator, in 1952, and the two lived together in Los Angeles until their divorce in 1968. Saar was part of the black arts movement of the early 1970s, applying the assemblage approach also being practiced by artists like Ed Kienholz and Bruce Conner to her own experiences as an African-American woman. In a process that would have a significant impact on her daughters’ work, she combined personal mementos, icons of American popular culture and references to African and other non-Western mythological systems.

Betye and Richard had three daughters: Lezley (born 1953) and Alison (born 1956), who became artists and share the limelight in this exhibition with their mother, and Tracey (the youngest), who became a writer and has contributed an essay to the show’s catalogue. Tracey notes the atmosphere of artistic creativity that pervaded the household. After the divorce, the girls lived with their mother but remained close to their father, and they attribute some of their sensitivity to materials to working with him in his conservation studio.

Despite differences in format and theme–Betye remains engaged with assemblage, while Lezley tends to work more two dimensionally and Alison is primarily a sculptor–there are strong threads that tie their work together. The curators have chosen to emphasize this continuity by arranging the show thematically rather than by individual artist. This partially blurs their individual artistic personalities, but also makes it possible to see the exhibition as an interconnected whole.

Not surprisingly, one of the most powerful themes here is family history. The exhibition opens with a selection of works that underscore continuities between generations. A 1964 etching by Betye depicts her and her two oldest daughters, and a set of collages presents photographic images of the clan’s female ancestors lightly silkscreened on embroidered handkerchiefs. These include Betye’s great-grandmother, Frances Parson White, a determined looking dark-skinned woman; Frances’s daughter Aunt Hattie, a very light-skinned woman in a fashionable flapper dress, who smiles coquettishly; and a faded photograph of three-year-old Betye posed as a flower girl. Another work, Wings of Morning (1987-92), is a memorial to Betye’s mother. It consists of a tombstone-shaped slab surrounded by twigs and embedded with objects relating to the mix of spiritual traditions–Christian/European and African Vodun–that signify her mixed heritage.

Alison comments more metaphorically on the weight of family history in Inheritance (2003), a sculpture of an adolescent African-American girl carrying a huge wrapped bundle of white sheets on her head. Reminiscent of African sculptures of women with elaborate headdresses or parcels on their heads, it also touches on the psychological burdens of sorting out an individual identity in such a close-knit family.