American,
b. Cherryville, North Carolina, 1977
Keisha Roberts draws inspiration
from African and African American history and culture,
and the striking graphic composition of African
textiles. Roberts forges passions for art, history,
and culture into fine art, exhibition experiences,
research projects, lectures, workshops, and works
of non-fiction.
Roberts’s current abstract and photographic
quilt art is a synthesis between figurative and
conceptual elements. Roberts infuses personal, familial,
and cultural memory into each contemporary quilt,
while incorporating the continuity and tradition
of generations of quiltmaking. She is also creating
quilted sculptures and integrates glass, ceramics,
and encaustic in her work to create quilted, mixed
media works of art.
Roberts was the project
coordinator for the nationally heralded oral history
project Behind the
Veil: Documenting African American Life in Jim Crow
South at the Center
for Documentary Studies at Duke University. She
wrote the chapter Resistance
and Political Struggles
in the book Remembering
Jim Crow: African Americans Tell About Life in the
Jim Crow South, which
won the Southern Regional
Council’s Lillian Smith Book Award, the
Multicultural Review’s
Carey McWilliams Book Award, and
the Library Journal’s
Best Book of 2001 award.
Roberts is president pro tem of the Professional
Art Quilt Alliance-South and is actively engaged
in several museum boards and committees. She has
curated and exhibited in solo, group, and traveling
exhibitions across the country. Her work is held
in private and public collections in the United
States and South Africa.
Roberts holds degrees in African and African American
Studies, History, and Women’s Studies, and
a certificate in Communications from Duke University.
She is currently studying non-profit management
at Duke University and collections management and
preventive conservation in the Museum Studies Graduate
Certificate Program in Collection Care at George
Washington University.
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