Deborah Roberts is an American collage artist who lives and works in Austin, Texas. Her work addresses the issue of otherness understood in the context of existing social norms of race and beauty.
In her works, Roberts challenges the existing notion of a universal beauty and instead advocates for a more inclusive and subjective understanding of visual culture. The artist combines found and manipulated images with hand drawn and painted details to create hybrid figures. These figures often take the form of black children, whose well-being and future are equally threatened.
In this way, she represents the complexity of black subjectivity and explores issues of race, identity, and gender politics. Roberts explains that “with collage, I can create a broader and more inclusive view of the black cultural experience.”
Chicos al arte proposal is to create stories and narratives around new compositions built from existing images. Give a new identity to something that already exists with colors and patterns.
Collage is a great technique to work with children, it requires few materials and not so much deployment! With scissors, glue and magazines you can put together the activity. Here we especially recommend the Arte para llevar collage kit to create wherever you want, it comes with divine self-adhesive templates.
Since the artist works with children, a good trigger for this activity is to give them images of children (they can be black and white prints) to intervene with eyes, noses, ears and other elements they find in magazines. Encourage them to add lots of color and incorporate animal parts too! Having a few pieces of Roberts on hand for kids to manipulate and draw inspiration from can be nice.
It is also an opportunity to play and take fun photos!!!
We ask them to cut out the intervened figures and then paste them on a colored sheet so we generate contrast with the background and a more attractive collage. It is also worth adding words that you find in magazines!
This is how these super collages turned out!!!
