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.
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.”
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét