Kyle Meyer: Interwoven

For all our sakes, I hope Deborah Roberts continues to stake a claim, through her work, for a more expansive view of Black children.

– Dawoud Bey

Deborah Roberts: 20 Years of Art/Work provides the definitive look at the artist’s practice over the past two decades. With newly commissioned texts and a thorough dive into Roberts’ archive, this monograph offers a comprehensive view of one of today’s most significant artists and social observers. An extensive plate section is accompanied by a personal, heartfelt foreword from Dawoud Bey on “the tragic mischaracterization of Black children”; an insightful essay from Ekow Eshun on the social and political histories of innocence, race, and the fractured nature of the contemporary Black experience; a celebratory tribute from Carolyn Jean Martin on the musicality, humility, and generosity of Roberts’ practice; and a free-ranging conversation between Roberts and Sarah Elizabeth Lewis.

Since the beginning of her artistic career, otherness has been at the center of Roberts’ consciousness. Her early ideals of race and beauty were shaped by and linked through Renaissance art and fashion magazines— mythical, heroic, beautiful, and powerful images that embodied a particular status not afforded equally to anyone Roberts knew. Influencing the way she viewed herself and other African Americans, those images led her to investigate the way their identities had been imagined and shaped by societal interpretations of beauty. Having one’s identity dismantled, marginalized and regulated to non-human status demanded action. This led Roberts to critically engage image-making in art history and pop-culture, and ultimately grapple with whatever power and authority these images have over the female figure.  

Rania Matar’s captivating photographs of young women around the world capture the transitory beauty of adolescence.

– Katie White, Artnet

As a Lebanese-born American artist and mother, Rania Matar’s cross-cultural experiences inform her art. She has dedicated her work to exploring issues of personal and collective identity through photographs of female adolescence and womanhood—both in the United States where she lives, and in the Middle East where she is from. Rania Matar: She focuses on young women in their late teens and early twenties, who are leaving the cocoon of home, entering adulthood and facing a new reality.

Depicting women in the United States and the Middle East, this project highlights how female subjectivity develops in parallel forms across cultural lines. Each young woman becomes an active participant in the image-making process, presiding over the environment and making it her own. Matar portrays the raw beauty of her subjects—their age, individuality, physicality and mystery—and photographs them the way she, a woman and a mother, sees them: beautiful, alive.

Her series question the notion of gender and the customs of our Western culture.

– Fisheye Magazine

In The Hunt, artist Céline Bodin creates a brief encyclopedia of female hairstyles across various periods in time, within the framework of Western culture. The series reflects upon the pictorial qualities of hair: studying its materiality, its ability to convey identity, also recalling the Victorian “hair medallion”—a small, decorative keepsake made from an ornate curl of a loved one’s hair, a pre-photographic memento that draws connections between portraiture, identity, and memory. The figures appear as ornate statues, each characterized by the aesthetic associations and revisited stereotypes ofx their hairstyle. The anonymity of the images presented in The Hunt activates the mind’s associative aptitude, drawing upon one’s own fantasies and projections of sensuality, innocence, order, freedom, frivolity, and social rank. Echoing classical art, these images refer to a mystical icon rather than presenting a portrait of an individual.

Learn more about the accompanying limited edition HERE.

They invite us into a space where objects, stories, and people are made and remade; restored and reenvisioned every day of our lives.

– Margo Jefferson

Edited by Frank Maresca
Texts by Margo Jefferson, Faith Ringgold, Lyle Rexer
Photography by Ellen McDermott
Collection of Deborah Neff

Clothbound with jacket
12 x 9.75 inches
232 pages / 44 color images / 32 duotone images
ISBN: 9781934435892

Co-published with the Mingeo International Museum

Trade: $45.00
Now Rare: $250 $500