Deborah Roberts is an American contemporary artist living and working in Austin, Texas. Roberts is a mixed media collage artist whose figurative works depict the complexity of Black subjecthood and explores themes of race, identity, and gender politics taking on the subject of otherness as understood against the backdrop of existing societal norms of race and beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the US and Europe. Roberts’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California. Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. Roberts was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), and the Ginsburg-Klaus Award Fellowship (2014). She received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Work

Roberts’s work challenges the existing notion of a universal beauty, arguing instead for a more inclusive and subjective understanding of visual culture. By combining found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details, Roberts leverages the artistic practice of collage to uplift and dimensionalize her subjects, often taking the form of young girls and, more increasingly, Black boys. The boys and girls who populate her work, while invariably bound to the complicated the problematic narratives defining American, African American and art history, are, at the same time, free and able to forge their own paths and form their own identities.^[1]

The show "Deborah Roberts: I’m" traveled to the Contemporary Austin, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Art + Practice in Los Angeles, and the Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens.^[2] She has also exhibited at Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia; LACMA, Los Angeles, California; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas; and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, among various other institutions.^[3]

Roberts’s work was included in the 2022 exhibition Women Painting Women at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.^[4]

Collections

Roberts's work is in the collections of:

• Museum of Fine Art, Boston, MA
• Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA
• Scottish National Galleries, Scotland, UK
• SFMOMA San Francisco, CA
• Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX
• Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL
• Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY
• The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA
• Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ
• Pérez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL
• Spelman College Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA
• The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY
• Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA
• Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

Awards

References