Deborah Roberts is making some of the best work of her life—just ask the artist herself. In “I’m,” a solo exhibition opening this weekend at The Contemporary Austin (her first at a museum in Texas, her home state), Roberts’s interrogations of Black bodies—how they’re seen, and when prejudice diminishes them—have a new urgency. Her figures loom larger in the frame than they used to, claiming more space for themselves. And if Roberts can’t easily explain that shift, what she does know is that it’s working. “I’ve always allowed the work to lead me,” she tells me. “It’s not always been down the right path, but it’s been an exercise, you know? And the work is getting better as it gets larger.”
Since she received her MFA from Syracuse University in 2014 (some 30 years after studying fine art as an undergraduate at the University of North Texas), Roberts’s star has steadily risen. People like Barack Obama, Beyoncé, Alicia Keys, and Swizz Beatz have acquired her collages, which layer found and painted imagery of faces, hands, torsos, and legs into composites that speak to both the commonality and the multiplicity of the Black experience, especially as it’s lived by children.
The collage work started slowly at Syracuse—until then, Roberts had primarily been a painter, working in a Norman Rockwell–inspired vernacular that she’d termed “Black Romantic”—and then in earnest when she returned to Austin, where she was born, raised, and still keeps her studio. A passage from Cornel West about the Black body helped to shape her approach. “I had that moment where I was like, ‘This is it. This is what I’ve been missing,’” says Roberts. “Literature, actually, started to be more important than the actual practice of creating, and as I read more, the work started to grow. I mean, it was ugly, it was nasty, it didn’t look like anything. But I had to go through those steps.” (More recently, the poet Sterling Brown’s adage that “Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”—charged with purpose and personality—inspired the title of her show at The Contemporary Austin.)
She soon landed on a mixed-media format incorporating elements of painted portraiture. “One of the big things that makes [the collages] so incredibly unique-looking is the skin texture that she hand-paints, and how subtle and nuanced it is,” says Heather Pesanti, the chief curator and director of curatorial affairs at The Contemporary Austin. Beyond the skin, Roberts also outfits her figures with painted gold fingernails and patterned fabrics.
To ward off imitators (of which, she notes, she’s had a few), Roberts keeps the sources of the photographs that she uses close; but she does allow some insight into her selection process. “There is a certain innocence that I look for in the faces,” she says. Her work wrestles with stereotypes attached to Black people from an early age—namely, the sexualization of young Black women and the criminality and threat of violence associated with Black men. The dissonance between what these figures look like and who they are is transmitted through their patchworked faces and overlong limbs, the signs of a developing-but-not-yet-adult body. (Discussing the particular dangers of being a Black boy, Roberts references Tamir Rice, the 12-year old who was shot and killed when a policeman mistook his toy gun for a real one in 2014. “Young boys are seen as men, and that’s very important,” she says.)
“At the base of everything that I’m trying to say is that we’re starting off with an innocent kid,” Roberts explains, “and I’m dealing with what society has drawn on.”
Yet in this new body of work, Roberts also gestures toward reclamation and valorization, returning some measure of agency to her figures by letting them take up more space. Where in her earlier compositions, the white surrounding her girls and boys could feel quietly oppressive, the subject in Jamal (2020), for example, feels “heroic,” as Roberts puts it. (Black boyhood takes on similarly epic proportions in the 2020 composition Little Man, little man, a wall mural commissioned from Roberts by The Contemporary Austin that pictures a boy in various states of joyful animation.)
Something is also reclaimed in the text-based work that appears in “I’m,” such as La’Condrea is a noun. (2020). With that piece, Roberts seeks to validate traditionally Black names, rooted as they are in the legacy of emancipation. “The purpose of my work is to create different pathways in order for people to talk about issues of race, gender, sexuality, and colorism,” she says. “When I say a name like Shemika, automatically you’re going to have a visual of who you think Shemika is, and [the idea of] the text-based work is to illuminate that these names are all driven from the first opportunity that the slaves had when they were freed to name their children.” By asserting that La’Condrea is a noun, even when word processors mark it as an error, Roberts forces a reckoning—and makes a humble request. “[The work] is trying to engage the audience to see things differently,” she says, “and to see the human part of being Black.”
“Deborah Roberts: I’m” is on view at The Contemporary Austin from January 23 through August 15. Advanced tickets are required for entry to the museum; reserve them here.