Rope-a-dope, created in 2017, places a young Black figure at the center of a charged visual field assembled from collaged photographic fragments, drawn passages, and painterly interventions on paper. Deborah Roberts builds her compositions by fracturing and reassembling the body, sourcing imagery from popular media and cultural archives to interrogate how Black children are seen, framed, and mythologized in the American imagination. The title invokes Muhammad Ali's famous boxing strategy, a deliberate performance of vulnerability that conceals inner strength, and that tension between perceived weakness and latent power runs throughout the work. The figure reads simultaneously as child and symbol, tender and resilient, caught between the innocence Roberts insists upon and the projections a racialized society imposes from without. Roberts has developed one of the most distinctive and urgent practices in contemporary American art, and works from this period represent a pivotal moment in which her formal vocabulary fully crystallized. The mixed media on paper format allows a rawness and directness that suits the subject matter, with the support itself becoming part of the visual argument rather than a neutral ground. Measuring 76.2 by 55.9 centimeters, the work is intimate in scale yet expansive in implication, demanding close attention in a way that mirrors the careful, protective gaze Roberts advocates for the children she portrays. The work is signed by the artist and offered through the Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution whose mission is inseparable from the critical tradition Roberts works within and advances.