Skewered

The protagonists of Deborah Roberts’ collages are eight to ten-year-old black girls—subjects who rarely find themselves in the spotlight of art history. Often wearing polka dots or striped skirts and bows or barrettes in their hair, these knobby kneed pre-teenagers remind us of the vulnerable, threshold age when kids—and especially girls—begin to possess a kind of self-consciousness that often devolves into insecurity, especially if they do not adhere to societal standards of beauty and behavior. In "Skewered," the bun at the top of the girl’s hair is, in fact, a painted pile of matches—a hint at the volatile events that inspired this portrait: the July 2017 acquittal of the Minnesota police officer who killed Philando Castile. Castile was an innocent black man whose girlfriend and her four-year-old daughter watched as he was shot to death after being stopped for a broken taillight. The police officer explained that his “broad nose” matched the description of a recent robbery suspect. Roberts explains the white mask held in her protagonist’s hand: “if she puts that in front of her, maybe she will survive.” As Roberts elaborated in a recent interview: “I need the collages to break ties as well as heal them; to be both powerful and vulnerable, fragile and fashionable, narrative and non-realistic, but most importantly I want them to challenge the notion that beauty is simply black and white, or only this and not that, and to challenge the notion that we should dehumanize others to feel superior.”