Deborah Roberts: I'm

About

Deborah Roberts critiques notions of beauty, race, and identity in contemporary society through the depiction of Black children. The traveling exhibition Deborah Roberts: I’m, presented concurrently at Art + Practice and the California African American Museum, expands on Roberts’s continued work of illustrating Black youth through collage. The artist’s mixed-media works on paper and canvas combine found images, sourced from the internet, with hand-painted details in striking figural compositions that invite viewers to look closely, to see through the layers. She focuses her gaze on Black children—historically, and still today, among the most vulnerable members of our population—investigating how societal pressures, projected images of beauty or masculinity, and the violence of American racism conditions their experiences. Simultaneously heroic and insecure, playful and serious, powerful and vulnerable, the figures Roberts depicts are complex and complete visions of Black personhood.