Interviewer: Is your work political?
Roberts: Of course.
Interviewer: How
so?
Roberts:
All of my work is political—some of it overtly
so, some of it not so evidently.
In my series Blood on the
Fields, I speak about the enslaved children,
mothers, fathers, sisters, and brothers whose masters
held title to them as if they were chattel, a tractor,
a tree, and worked them and tortured them. They
bled on this land.
I speak about the many nations of people who are
indigenous to North America, who were hunted, and
driven from their homeland.
And migrant workers who risk their lives to escape
to this country and perform dangerous agricultural
labor in pesticide-ridden fields.
I speak about prison and Chinese workers who built
railroads and constructed a physical financial infrastructure
for this country.
And slaughtered animals.
When I think about our country’s violent ambience,
and the centuries over which it has been so, I have
a difficult time imagining that there can be a grain
of dirt that has not been washed in blood.
My series Diamond
brings light to the workers in mines. Our purchases
subject these people to regular body cavity examinations
and other intolerable, inhumane practices. We hurt
these people so we can wear a rock?
The subjects of my
photographic quilts are black and unapologetically
so. This is political. I explore their, our, beauty
within a cultural setting in which many still view
black skin and hair and speech and cultural expression
with disdain and contempt. In fact, many African
Americans have internalized this worldview.
More often than not, when blacks have even appeared
in Western figurative works, they have been objectified,
objects, acted upon. Or they were simply background
material. In my work, African Americans are subjects,
thinkers, initiators. The people I represent in
my quilts are beautiful and dignified people.
My work is political in so many ways. If you distill
all of these considerations, you are left with my
aesthetic. I assert an aesthetic that someone, or
perhaps a coalition of someones, has deemed other
in some way. The fact that I, a black woman, even
claim an aesthetic could be considered an act of
defiance. |
