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Deborah Roberts — One history, two versions (Bullet Points)
Deborah Roberts

One history, two versions (Bullet Points)

2019

"One history, two versions (Bullet Points)" positions a Black doll's face as the organizing symbol of a visual argument about race, memory, and the ongoing negotiation of African-American identity. Made in 2019 as part of Roberts' "Bullet Points" series, created for the exhibition "If They Come," the work uses collaged motifs to construct what the artist describes as a kind of to-do list, a reckoning with the unresolved tensions her practice continually addresses. A badge invoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech appears alongside the outstretched arm of King's memorial statue in Washington D.C., threading the aspirations of the Civil Rights era into a present still shaped by those struggles. The doll, swathed in a scarf bearing the stars of the American flag, carries the full weight of that inheritance, its expression of wide-eyed innocence underscoring the vulnerability of Black children forming their identities within a visual culture built largely around the white gaze. Roberts' command of collage as a political instrument draws on a lineage that runs from the Dada practitioners of the early twentieth century, among them Hannah Höch, who wielded the medium to interrogate the social forces behind the First World War, through to the contemporary artists who have reclaimed it as a tool for dissecting structural violence and racial inequity. In Roberts' hands, fragmentation becomes a form of testimony: the assembled image speaks to cross-generational solidarity, to the hands that, as the artist herself has said, lift one another so that all may move forward. Printed on Somerset Tub Sized 600gsm in an edition of one hundred and signed by the artist, this work offers collectors not only a formally rigorous and historically grounded object, but a considered contribution to one of the most urgent conversations in contemporary art.

Medium
Screenprint on Somerset Tub Sized 600gsm
Sheet
Signed
Yes
Location
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

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About this work

Deborah Roberts, One history, two versions (Bullet Points), 2019

"One history, two versions (Bullet Points)" positions a Black doll's face as the organizing symbol of a visual argument about race, memory, and the ongoing negotiation of African-American identity. Made in 2019 as part of Roberts' "Bullet Points" series, created for the exhibition "If They Come," the work uses collaged motifs to construct what the artist describes as a kind of to-do list, a reckoning with the unresolved tensions her practice continually addresses. A badge invoking Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech appears alongside the outstretched arm of King's memorial statue in Washington D.C., threading the aspirations of the Civil Rights era into a present still shaped by those struggles. The doll, swathed in a scarf bearing the stars of the American flag, carries the full weight of that inheritance, its expression of wide-eyed innocence underscoring the vulnerability of Black children forming their identities within a visual culture built largely around the white gaze. Roberts' command of collage as a political instrument draws on a lineage that runs from the Dada practitioners of the early twentieth century, among them Hannah Höch, who wielded the medium to interrogate the social forces behind the First World War, through to the contemporary artists who have reclaimed it as a tool for dissecting structural violence and racial inequity. In Roberts' hands, fragmentation becomes a form of testimony: the assembled image speaks to cross-generational solidarity, to the hands that, as the artist herself has said, lift one another so that all may move forward. Printed on Somerset Tub Sized 600gsm in an edition of one hundred and signed by the artist, this work offers collectors not only a formally rigorous and historically grounded object, but a considered contribution to one of the most urgent conversations in contemporary art.

Medium
Screenprint on Somerset Tub Sized 600gsm
Dimensions
sheet: 59.4 x 42 cm
Year
2019
Edition
of 100
Signed
Hand-signed by the artist
Seen at
Stephen Friedman Gallery, London

More works by Deborah Roberts

Collected by

Sebastián Naranjo