Multimedia show at Cummer Museum puts spotlight on Black children
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You have to look really close at the artwork in "Deborah Roberts: I'm" to tell what's painted and what's pasted.
Roberts' show runs at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens through Dec. 4. The show features large multimedia portraits of Black children, with their bodies painted on the canvas and their faces pieced together from color and black-and-white photos, all against a plain white background.
Another series in the show uses the same technique, but sets it against a black background. A third is made up of enlarged printouts of Black names that Roberts typed into a word-processing program, only to have them flagged with the squiggly red underlines that denote a misspelling or grammar error.
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Roberts, from Austin, Texas, is an old friend of Cummer CEO Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, who called the works beautiful and complex but also a little difficult to view.
Roberts said the show is an effort to combine American history, art history, Black history and pop culture. The children in the paintings are often striking poses, trying to find their own identity. The idea, she said, is to show "what it means to be an 'I,' not a 'we.' "
She said it didn't even start as a show, just a collection of pieces in her Texas studio. "I don't work toward shows," Roberts said during a media preview of the show. "I'm just an artist who works."
The pieces featuring Black children are meant to be thought-provoking, said Roberts, who was one of the first children bused to a desegregated school in her hometown of Austin. The faces of the children are assembled from photos of several different people and all of them are staring straight out of the canvas. The ones set against a white background are particularly striking. "We move in white space all the time," Roberts said. "The whiteness is important to the image."
Roberts' work is catching on — the Jacksonville show is the fourth and final show on this tour and the only one on the East coast. Beyonce, Jay Z and Barack and Michelle Obama own original Deborah Roberts works and she sold $187,000 worth of art in three days at a New York gallery show.
Success has brought problems, though. Other artists have noticed her work and are copying her style. "I'm not even dead yet and they're copying my work," she said.
Deborah Roberts: I'm
Through Sunday, Dec. 4, at the Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens
$15 museum admission, free 4-9 p.m. Tuesdays and Fridays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on the first Saturday of every month
• Let's Talk! 904ward race cards conversation, 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, Oct. 11
• Look at That! Noon Wednesday, Oct. 12
• Elevated Voices for Healing — Art as a System of Support panel discussion, 6 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15
• Perception, Poetry & Pivot youth workshop with Taryn Wharwood, 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 5
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville's Cummer Museum puts spotlight on Black children
