Deborah Roberts investigates otherness by breaking down long-established and monolithic societal conceptions of beauty and belonging—art historical pop cultural, and psychological—and promoting in their place new standards of beauty and self-expression. Roberts, who lives and works in Austin, Texas, uses motifs of African American girlhood to emphasize identity and its dual abilities to empower and oppress. Her collages bring together imagery that highlights the implications of societal pressures and privilege that dominate mass media, presenting excluded and marginalized perspectives to fight against generalized and discriminatory perceptions of Black female experiences.
Her abstractly figurative work speaks both to the universal and the specific: Roberts says “when you look at my work, you have to look at every part of the face and make something out of those fragments. That’s one of the gifts of the work—to see people differently, and not just as one being. Blackness is global."1 Roberts implores viewers to see the humanity—the vulnerability, the strength, and the beauty—in her subjects so that they can see humanity in themselves. The present work, Folding the Red into the Black, 2018/2021, is a unique, hand-embellished artist’s proof created by the artist specifically for this charity sale.
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