Deborah Roberts Austin, Texas, b. 1962

Born in 1962, Deborah Roberts lives and works in Austin, Texas.
She was selected to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg Residency (2019) and is a recipient of the Anonymous Was A Woman award (2018) and a Pollock‑Krasner Foundation grant (2016). Roberts received her Master of Fine Arts degree from Syracuse University in New York.

She is a mixed‑media artist whose work challenges the notion of ideal beauty.

Roberts’s painting engages with social commentary and questions stereotypes and myths, creating a dialogue around ideas of inclusion, dignity, consumption, and subjectivity by addressing beauty through the figure of the ideal woman: Venus. By interrogating Venus, her work opens space for women of color who have historically been excluded from this definition.

Her work has been exhibited internationally throughout the United States and Europe. Roberts’s work is held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, LACMA in Los Angeles, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, among other institutions.