Holly ROBERTS

Holly Roberts’ creates one-of-a-kind images. Beginning with photographs, she draws, paints, and sometimes collages other elements onto the surface, including pieces from other photographs. The photographic traces sometimes appear, sometimes disappear.

Roberts’ inspiration derives from multiple sources…personal experiences, the iconography and mythology of the native cultures in New Mexico where she lives, and the landscape of Albuquerque.

Her physician-husband as well as her children were often her models, though unrecognizable in her heavily-reworked photographs.

This photographically-based image references an emergency trip to the hospital of her mother who suffered a brain aneurysm. The car is being driven by “death”, and the road-kill along the way, a metaphor for the probable prognosis for her mother’s survival.

Holly Roberts work is held in more than 30 public institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, Stanford University, the Center for Creative Photography, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In addition, she has been in multiple group exhibitions such as “Defining Eye: Woman Photographers of the Twentieth Century, St. Louis Art Museum, and “the Art of Photography,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Source: Originally presented at the June 20, 2013 SBMA Collections Committee