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By using images from American history, Black culture, Pop culture and Black history, Roberts takes on a powerful social commentary, critiquing perceptions of ideal beauty, and challenging stereotypes and myths. Her process combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of young girls and increasingly Black boys, whose wellbeing and futures are equally threatened because of the double standard of boyhood and criminality that is projected on them at such a young age. The boys and girls who populate her work, while subject to societal pressures and projected images, are still unfixed in their identity. Each child has character and agency to find their own way amidst the complicated narratives of American, African American and art history.
Artwork by Deborah Roberts
Foreword by Dawoud Bey
Texts by Carolyn Jean Martin, and Ekow Eshun
Conversation with Sarah LewisHardcover
8.25 x 12.5 inches
240 pages / 125 images
Originally $65 / Now RARE $150America cover — Trade ISBN: 9781955161107
Red Crosses cover — Trade ISBN: 9798890180711 -
Deborah Roberts (American, b. 1962) is a mixed media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the USA and Europe. Roberts' work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; LACMA, Los Angeles, CA; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; and Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX, among other institutions. She was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and was a finalist for the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, as well as the recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman Grant (2018), Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016), and Texas Medal of Arts Award in Visual Arts (2023). Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University, NY. She lives and works in Austin, TX. Roberts is represented by Stephen Friedman Gallery, London, UK, and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects, CA.
I am increasingly interested in the residual power of the past to inhabit material remains…Manifest is an effort to seek out the artifacts and material evidence of the American construct and representation of race.
— Wendel A. White
Manifest | Thirteen Colonies is the culmination of a multiyear journey by photographer Wendel A. White to find and document African American material culture in the libraries, museums, and archives of the thirteen original English colonies and Washington, DC. This “personal reliquary of Black agency and racial oppression stored in public collections” includes both singular objects connected to significant figures (a lock of Frederick Douglass’s hair, Malcolm X’s tape recorder) and more quotidian materials (a hair straightening comb, a pressed corsage). Given the same photographic treatment—each object centered on a stark black background and captured with a shallow depth of field—the distinction between the “significant” and the “quotidian” dissolves, as White makes it clear they are all important pieces of forensic evidence of Black life and history in the United States.
New essays by Cheryl Finley, Ilisa Barbash, and Leigh Raiford provide historical and sociological context for the objects in White’s images, while conversations with Deborah Willis and Brenda Dione Tindaldelve into White’s personal history, his life as a photographer, and the bodies of work that led to Manifest | Thirteen Colonies.