Debroah Roberts - Between them, 2019
80 x 61 in, Mixed Media Collage on Paper
Deborah Roberts wasn’t born a triplet, but she often felt like it growing up. Two of her sisters and herself were all born within two years of each other. She remembers people calling the three of them, stringing together their first names so that it became its own uniquely muddled phrase. Knowing this, it’s difficult not to think of Roberts’s works: We Are Soldiers (2019), Between Them (2019), An Act of Power (2018), and The Sleepwalkers (2017) all show three young Black girls with braids and barrettes, consciously or unconsciously mirroring each other as they make their way through Black girlhood.
Born in 1962 and raised in Austin, Texas, Roberts is one of eight; she has an additional sister and four brothers. She started exploring her artistic side in the third grade and quickly realized her drawings were good enough to trade for the things third graders treasure: pencils, popularity, and other odds and ends. “I could draw people under the table!” Roberts told me recently with a laugh, her wide smile widening even more at the memory. - Deborah Roberts’s Gripping Collages Reconfigure Black Girlhood
