Deborah Roberts

Today, I finally had to draw a line in the sand when it comes to my work and what others may think of it. Will this person like this or that!!! Should I add more of this or less of that ... go big or small ... WTF! Kerry James Marshall told me and my friend Zoe once ( after we snuck into the SFMOMA to see him before his show open ) that if we did work only to please curators, galleries and dealers we had lost our souls. He was right. I think artists should do the work that feeds their soul and get the message THEY want out to the world whether everyone gets it or not!  I don't think an artist will ever move forward if they spend any part of their studio time doubting themselves or trying to do work that will please certain people or a certain audience. Because chances are the work will start to look convoluted and diluted,which is the last thing any artist wants. And if this happens no one wins especially the people you want to reach. Finding ones artistic voice is not an ...

Deborah Roberts: Art & Social Trauma and the role of Black artists : What does it mean to be a Black artist in the age of social consciousness? The protests, the unrest and the BlackLivesMatter movement is swe...

What does it mean to be a Black artist in the age of social consciousness? The protests, the unrest and the BlackLivesMatter movement is sweeping the nation causing a shift in the national consciousness and shining a light on the disparity of privilege and mass incarceration. Thousands of people are marching in the streets demanding that America, a country built on the premise of civil liberty speak out valiantly that justice and accountability must be afforded to all its citizens equally.  As an artist and a human being I'm drawn to the visceral affect of the faces I have seen on TV and in protests marches. I am mortified when I see some of the news media demonize and cast protesters as sub-human and not people who are angry, desperate and unable to breathe under the oppression of a system setup for them to live in the margins of society. While we are familiar with this narrative it's important that the images that are thrust in front of us are not just media driven. Is it th...

Recently, I had a long discussion with another artist about artist assistants. She believed that if assistants were doing most of the labor then the final work was a "collaborative" piece. What became obvious after a twenty-five minute ( let's agree to disagree ) discussion is that this is a major topic within the art world. Apprenticeships or artist assistants has been going on since the 14th century with little fan fare or disapproval. However, today most people are complaining that artists like Damien Hirst, Khinde Wiley and others are having studio assistants preform all the hard labor when it comes to producing their works. How do you generate mass amounts of work without help when you have garnered the attention of the art world, which can be short-lived and fickle? Is this fair? The notion of assistants will never really be resolved because some artists are going to champion the idea and others are going to view it as cheating. I think it is not fair to critic...

(Flow) positive psychology, flow, also known as the zone, is a mental state of operation in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In essence, flow is the characterized by complete absorption in what one does. [Wikipedia] One of the most difficult things is finding the zone ... your creative art zone! It's a place where almost everything you do in your practice is working and the ideas are flowing. You are unstoppable, each medium you try is working and the adrenaline for creating mass amounts art is at its highest peak. You can't sleep for the fear that it may leave and we as artists can bare witness to the notion that it eventually leaves you. It usually has nothing to do with drugs,liquor or any other substances, though I've heard from others that it can ignite the flow. As for me, when it happens I love it! I don't anything special, because I wor...

I think every artists feels this way, at some point in their career,  what's the value of my work and how do I price it?  If these questions aren't not bad enough this one is even harder, pricing someone else's artwork. So, please stop asking me because I don't know what to tell you about pricing... well I do, but who wants to be the one that burst another person's bubble. Some artists invite curators over and asked them, others just wing it. This leads to overpricing or under pricing the work. I have witness artists selling things one week for one price and the next for another. This is a bad practice! Personally, I tried to be fair with my prices, I've always wanted to get my work out to as many people as possible hence my low prices. It helped me be able to maintain a great client list for a long time and when it was time to raise the prices (actually my dealer did) I was okay with it.  I put in the time both with my status as a practicing artist and my ...