“I want the same thing for Black girls that white girls receive…I want Black girls to know, just because they appear mighty doesn’t mean they can’t be vulnerable. I want Black girls to be treated as children, not adults.”  —Deborah Roberts in The New York Times, 2022 

Artist Deborah Roberts returns to Boston for an evening of conversation on her powerful and distinctive art works that contend with dominant portrayals and narratives of Black youth. Roberts will be joined by Ruth Erickson, ICA’s Mannion Family Senior Curator and the lead organizer of the exhibition To Begin Again: Artists and Childhood, which includes several works by the artist.

Deborah Roberts is a mixed-media artist whose work challenges notions of ideal beauty. Her work has been exhibited internationally across the U.S. and Europe and is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem; LACMA, Los Angeles; the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond; and the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, among other institutions. She was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency in 2019 and was a finalist for the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, as well as the recipient of the Anonymous Was a Woman Grant in 2018, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2016. Roberts received her MFA from Syracuse University, New York. She lives and works in Austin, Texas.