The artist: Though she’s been making art since she was a child, it wasn’t until she was in her mid-50s that Deborah Roberts became a market darling. In 2017, the Austin-based artist’s life changed after her mixed-media works were included in several prominent exhibitions, including the group show Fictions at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum acquired her work, as did famous collectors like Beyoncé, Ava DuVernay and President Barack Obama.
Now 58, Roberts is known for collaged portraits of Black children, in which she combines found imagery with painting and drawing. Of the reason she’s drawn to her subjects, she explains, Black children “are seen as less innocent; they’re treated as adults when they do kid stuff. I thought I had a really good childhood and I want kids to be able to have that.” Growing up in Austin, Roberts had seven siblings; her mother worked as a maid and her father as an electrical lineman for the city. Though her focus has long been on girls and expanding the beauty standards that are imposed on them, Roberts now portrays Black boys too. “I didn’t know the numbers on how many young Black boys were put in special-ed classes or labeled as early as third grade as being very difficult, hard to teach,” she says. “I wanted to start highlighting some of the issues that young Black boys were facing.”
Roberts says her fast rise has been overwhelming at times. “I’m getting better control over it,” she says. “The first few years, I didn’t know what was happening. Now, I understand… I have to be a good steward.”
Her latest show: Roberts’s new show, I’m, which debuts at the Contemporary Austin January 23, is her first major solo museum exhibition in Texas. I’m features her paintings, signature collages and an interactive sound, text and video sculpture. The museum also commissioned Roberts to create an ongoing installation, a mural on one of its buildings. Titled Little man, little man, a tribute to James Baldwin’s children’s book of the same name, the mural depicts a young Black boy in six different poses of dance and celebration.
The show was originally scheduled for a September opening, but it was moved due to the coronavirus. Roberts used the extra time to continue working on collages she had started in 2019. Living through a pandemic, she noticed, affected her work. “When we went into lockdown, the idea that anybody could just say hello to you and give you this deadly illness—people became more important than normal,” she says. She noticed that when she got back to her studio practice, the portraits she was producing became larger. Keeping them smaller no longer felt right.
Her “aha” moment: Roberts, who’s worked as an artist her entire adult life, characterizes her shift from figurative painting to collage as a gradual one that happened when she was completing her MFA at Syracuse, which she graduated from in 2014. But when the new medium started to click, she knew it was the “language [she’d] been looking for,” she says.
Roberts credits literature with helping her find her niche. “I love Toni Morrison. I read her like the Bible,” she says. “I love bell hooks. When I want to get revved up, Cornel West. Michelle Alexander. Claudia Rankine. Jeff Chang—he’s not a Black guy, but his writing is so good, I listen to him all the time. That’s my boy. There are so many books I read just to get me going.” During the pandemic, Roberts jokes that she’s been reading “junk,” including Daniel Silva’s Gabriel Allon secret agent series, because she can’t mentally inhabit reality all the time.
Her mantra: Roberts has a rule she displays in her studio she says she can’t live without: “This work is not going to be for everybody, and not everybody’s going to get it,” she says. “And you should be OK with it. It’s weird that you have to write that stuff down, [but] I’m one of those people who needs to see it.”
Her talisman: “My assistants laugh at me because I have a favorite paintbrush to put my collages down. I have the same jar; I have the same brush, and I get super mad if I forget to put water in that jar and it dries out and my brush gets so gross that we can’t use it. That’s my favorite thing. I call it the gravy. That’s the special magic that creates these collages. I’m crazy, as you can see. It’s a pickle jar. That’s a magic pickle jar, and it’s perfect.”
Her aspirations: “I would hope that the work would be in every major museum in the United States and the world,” she says of her art. “I’m hoping it’s in key places, especially my text-based work, where women who have names that are not as simple to pronounce as other names, they could go in a place and see their presence there.” She’s referring to her silkscreened text works which show names commonly given to Black women like Shawnya and Jazmin underlined in red, Microsoft Word–style, to show how the software doesn’t recognize the spelling.
Her influences: Roberts says she loves American painters Amy Sherald and the late Benny Andrews, as well as multimedia artist and photographer Carrie Mae Weems. (“She’s my art hero,” says Roberts.) She also brings up Ava DuVernay: “She’s not an artist in the sense of someone who would paint pictures, but she’s creating the narrative we want to see when we look at ourselves and what we want the world to see,” she says. “That’s pretty much what I’m trying to do with my practice.”
