Wendel A. White: Manifest | Thirteen Colonies

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.  

Model Citizens considers the US as a case study into a global phenomenon: how have staging, performance, and roleplay come to inform thinking about citizenship in a violent land whose people no longer agree on what is true?

The last in a trilogy of books on the American condition, Model Citizens includes photographs from US Border Patrol Academy training scenarios, “Save America” rallies, and history museums. Jarringly juxtaposed images from these apparently unrelated sites illuminate systems that reconcile, justify, or distract from the harsh realities of life in a polarized, militarized society. The design accentuates slippages: images flow across French-fold page turns, just as Cornwall’s practice questions the role of documentary photography in an era of splintered realities.

The Model Citizens project was awarded the 2023 Prix Elysée, a biennial juried prize for mid-career photographers, sponsored by the Photo Elysée Museum in Lausanne, Switzerland. The award also includes a grant for a concurrent publication in both English and French (Citoyens Modèles, Éditions Textuel, 2024). Both editions were released to coincide with Les Rencontres d’Arles de la Photographie in 2024.

Indigenous artists worldwide respond to environmental destruction.

Documenting international Indigenous artists’ responses to the impacts of nuclear testing, nuclear accidents and uranium mining on Native peoples and the environment, Exposure gives artists a voice to address the long-term effects of these manmade disasters on Indigenous communities in the United States and around the world. Indigenous artists from Australia, Canada, Greenland, Japan, the Pacific Islands and the US utilize local and tribal knowledge, as well as Indigenous and contemporary art forms as visual strategies for their works.

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