Look the girl in the eyes.
What do you see?
Is there boldness in them? Apprehension? Joy? Fear?
The more you meet the gaze of the girls and boys in Deborah Roberts' compelling, challenging collages, the more you see. In these Black children you discover a multiplicity of feelings and attitudes, youth and age fused together, symbols at once seemingly innocuous and racist. In them you may see something about the child or something about how society views the child. Or you may see something about yourself.
This is all because of the care with which Roberts creates her works, how she positions each figure, the posture and demeanor telling one story; clothes each one, layering on color, print, and pattern (its own story); and, most dramatically, constructs each face of different photographs – say, one eye of a young girl, the other of a middle-aged man, the lips of a mature woman – the faces telling many stories, all of them complex.