Artist Talk With Deborah Roberts

“Whether I was aware of it or not, otherness has been at the center of my consciousness since the beginning of my artistic career,” says visual artist Deborah Roberts.

On Saturday, August 5, at 5 p.m., come to The Church in as it dives into Roberts’s work, process, and her thoughts and reflection on race, beauty, identity. How do societal pressures influence us, and what are the challenges we must make to claim our space within the context of beauty?

Roberts’s work challenges stereotypes and myths and is layered with symbols, multiplicity, and double meaning. Inspired by the power and mythos of renaissance paintings and fashion photography, and aware of the absence of women of color, Roberts found her early ideals about race and beauty needing to be questioned, examined, and investigated. It creates a dialogic that asks the audience: “What is beautiful?,” “Who gets to be beautiful?,” “What is Beauty?” and most importantly, “Are you, dear viewer, capable of seeing the individual beneath the social projection? Would you fight for them to see it too?”

Roberts’s work “Fight the Power,” a reference to the 1989 Public Enemy Song featured in Spike Lee’s film, “Do the Right Thing,” is on view in “Strike Fast, Dance Lightly: Artists on Boxing,” the exhibition currently running at The Church which will be on view through September 3.

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 U.S. and Europe. Roberts’s work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, Guggenheim Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem in New York; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, 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), the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (2016) and Texas Metal of Arts Award (2023). Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University and now lives and works in Austin, Texas.

Tickets for Deborah Roberts talk are $25 ($18 members) at thechurchsagharbor.org. The Church is at 48 Madison Street in Sag Harbor.