'As I examine my own personal history, I find myself restating the large psychological issues of my life with more depth and clarity. In attempting to understand these complicated issues that have to do with fear, anxiety, loneliness, humor, love and the interconnectedness of living beings, I find myself creating images as simple and as honest as I can make them.'

Holly Roberts Resume

Born: 1951, Boulder, Colorado.

Education: Arizona State University (MFA), University of New Mexico (BA, Special Distinction), University of New Mexico at Quito, Ecuador, Bellas Artes De Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, Mexico.

Selected Individual Exhibitions:

2006 "Transpositions: Paint and Photocollage," Parks Gallery, Taos, NM

2005 Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ

"A Cracked Woman," Harwood Art Center, Albuquerque, NM

Sara Smith Contemporary, Corrales, NM

2003 Parks Gallery, Taos, NM

The Photography Room, Grand Rapids, MI

2002 Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Mainsite Gallery, Norman, TX

2001 University of West Florida, Pensacola, FL

Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM

Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Soho Photo Gallery, New York City, NY

Galerie Peter Borchardt, Hamburg, Germany

2000 Robert C. May Photography Endowment Lecture Series, U. of Kentucky Art Museum, Lexington, KY

Parks Gallery, Taos, NM

1999 University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY

Edelman Gallery, Chicago, IL

LewAllen Contemporary, Santa Fe, NM

1998: Parks Gallery, Taos, NM

Walter Gomez Gallery, Baltimore, MD

Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA

1997: Gibson Gallery, Seattle, WA

Soho Photo Gallery, New York City, NY

Pulliam Deffenbaugh Gallery, Portland, OR

Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Galisteo, NM

1995: Film and Photography Gallery, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA

Etherton Gallery, Tucson, AZ

Linda Durham Contemporary Art, Galisteo, NM

Ehlers/Caudill Gallery, Chicago, IL

1994: Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco, CA

Roger Williams University, School of

Architecture Gallery, Bristol, RI

1993: Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA

"Revisions," Linda Durham Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

1992: Presentation House Gallery,

Presentation House, North Vancouver, B.C., Canada

Ehlers/ Caudill Gallery, Chicago, IL

1991: Benteler-Morgan Gallery, Houston, TX

Jayne H. Baum Gallery, New York City, NY

1990: Friends of Photography, San Francisco, CA

Photographic Resource Center, Boston University, Boston, MA

1989: Jayne H. Baum Gallery, New York, NY

Linda Durham Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

Ehlers/Caudill Gallery, Chicago, IL

1988: "Holly Roberts: Animals," Film in the Cities, St. Paul, MN

1986: Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ

1985: Marcuse Pfeifer Gallery, New York City, NY

Selected Group Exhibitions:

1998: "Introductions: Holly Roberts, Mical Aloni, Marc Baseman," The Parks Gallery, Taos, NM

1997-1998: "Developing a Collection: The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation and the Art of Photography," Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, O'Keeffe's New Mexico," Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM

1997: "The Painted Photograph: Hand-colored Photography, 1839 to the Present," The University of Wyoming Art Museum, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY

"Defining Eye: Woman Photographers of the Twentieth Century," St. Louis Art Museum, St Louis, MO

1996: "Painted and Constructed," Atrium Gallery, School of Fine Arts, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT

"Southwest '96," Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM (Award of Merit)

1995: "Woman in Photography," Spectrum Gallery, Light Impressions, Rochester, NY

1994: "4 x 4: Late Modern; Photography Between the Edges," Museum of Fine Arts, Santa Fe, NM

1992: "New Acquisitions/New Work/New Directions," Los Angeles County Art Museum, Los Angeles, CA

1991: "La Photographie en Miettes," Musee National D’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris

"Photographs from the David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg Collection," Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

"At One/At War with Nature," Pratt-Manhattan Gallery, New York, NY

1990: "Photographs as Support," Graham Modern, New York City, NY

1989: "Fictive Strategies: Actuality and Originality in Contemporary Photography," The Squibb Gallery, Princeton, NJ

"Borderline: Photography in the 150th Year," Artspace, New Haven, CT

Awards:

1988: National Endowment for the Arts, Photography

1986: National Endowment for the Arts, Photography

Ferguson Grant, Friends of Photography, Carmel, CA

Selected Publications:

1998: "Taos Exhibit," Hollis Walker, Pasatiempo, Santa Fe, NM

1997: "Defining Eye: Women Photographers of the 20th Century," Olivia Lahs-Gonzales and Lucy Lippard, The Saint Louis Art Museum

1994: "The Body," William A. Ewing, Thames and Hudson

1991: "The Horse: Photographic Images, 1839 to the Present," Gerald Lang and Lee Marks, Harry N. Abrams

1990; "Holly Roberts," Untitled Series, Friends of Photography, San Francisco, CA

"Northwest by Southwest; Painted Fictions," Palm Springs Desert Museum, Palm Springs, CA

1988: "Exploring Color Photography," Robert Hirsch, W.M.C. Brown Company

1987: "Photography and Art; Interactions Since 1946," Kathleen Gauss and Andrew Grundberg, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

A Strange, Dark Way of Looking at the World

By Robbie Steinbach

Artist Holly Roberts says that her new work surprises even her. After she created a painting that turned out to be a mermaid - a subject she has never before broached - she was shocked. Roberts exclaims, “It was like looking down at my own feet and discovering I was in high heels. I consider myself more of a plastic sandals kind of woman.”

Holly Roberts is an artist who has shown nationally and internationally, and has received many awards, including two NEA fellowships and a Ferguson Grant from the Friends of Photography. She has had two monographs published about her work. Recently Roberts decided to give herself a sabbatical from her art work. She went walking in the bosque with her daughter and took photographs of the cottonwoods. She learned Photoshop on the computer. She looked at a lot of other people’s work. “I thought I was busy doing other things,” Roberts states, “but now I know I was gathering information for when I started painting again.” When she began creating, the artist found that she was doing things differently, reversing things. In her previous works, Roberts had begun with photographs that inspired her and then painted over them. Now she found herself creating backgrounds of beautiful, abstract paintings. She cut up her photographic images. “I found,” she says, “when I destroyed my ‘nice’ photos, all the good stuff began to happen.” The reconfigured photos were then laid on top of the abstract paintings. Sometimes Roberts would play with scraps of other materials to add texture, then use a final topcoat of paint on the surface.

The artist became fascinated with building up body parts for her figures that were created out of other things – a person’s feet made of teeth, a torso made of birds, trees, or sticks – as in Boy with Man on a Leash. She liked the idea of a “real” object that is not what it is, playing with the alleged verity of the photographic medium. Roberts says, “I see this new process as akin to quilting, bringing in material with different patterns and making something totally new out of it.”

Although her approach has changed, Holly Roberts somewhat ruefully admits that the work still reflects her “strange dark way of looking at the world.” Boy with Man on a Leash plays with the idea of control: controlling and being controlled, feeling powerless in today’s world. Man at the Table addresses not only specific crises like starvation in Africa, but also the feeling of never having enough.

The painting entitled Boy with Shadows is especially poignant. The young boy, pulling a silly face for the camera, is Roberts’ second cousin. “He’s a neat kid”, the artist says, “just a wonderful sweet guy, positive and loving.” However, he comes from a family that has been hard hit by cancer. The negative shapes, the shadows, represent not only the loss of loved ones, but a possible ominous future lurking for the boy. As with all of her art, Roberts did not start with the piece completely resolved in her mind. She starts with an idea, lets it travel from her head to her hands, and allows it to go where it needs to go.

Roberts thinks it is important to let her images take her where they need to go. “Sometimes I pull from the dark side,” she admits, “but I create something positive out of it. That keeps the darkness from eating you up.” And sometimes she might unexpectedly find something like high heels on her feet, and laugh.

The Handmade Photography of Holly Roberts

By Robert Wilson

In his 2003 essay Flexible Images: Handmade American Photography, 1969-2002, Robert Hirsch quotes Holly Roberts: “My unconscious intelligence directs my hands to tell the materials where to go. It allows the emotional/spiritual channels to open up. This does not happen because we think about it, explain it, or conceptualize it. It occurs because we put our hands in it and that act takes us somewhere else.” 1

Within the school of artists Hirsch defines as “handmade photographers”, Roberts occupies a position at the intuitive end of the spectrum. Much of manipulated photography relies on technical ways of treating film and the printed image, or pragmatic approaches to restructuring the photograph. The method that has enabled Roberts to “open up the emotional/spiritual channels”, has been, until recently, paint applied around and over the photograph or photo collage. A change has come about in the last three years, following a two-year hiatus during which she rethought and then revamped her approach. She now applies collaged photographs and other printed materials onto a pre-painted surface, using minimal paint thereafter over the collage. She is using the same toolbox, but with different methods, to address an evolved set of subjects.

The handmade photographers Hirsch writes about manipulate the photograph either before or after it is printed, sometimes before and after. The act of coloring or otherwise altering the photograph is as old as photography itself, examples of marked and painted daguerreotypes dating back to the mid-1800s. But Hirsch’s contemporary school of photograph manipulators rose largely out of the counter-cultural movements of the 1960s. Still, as he points out, there is common ground between the handmade photographers of these two eras: “the importance of making a highly personal response to experience and a critical response to society.” There is no better description of what Holly Roberts does, intellectually, in making art with the photograph.

Before her, other handmade photographers broke ranks with standard photography in order to make personal statements about society, experience, and consciousness. Robert Heinecken appropriated images, layered text and image, and constructed and reconstructed photographs, sometimes in 3-D. Naomi Savage pushed photography further into three dimensional forms, exemplified by her presentation of the photoetched plate itself, a “topographic photograph”. Douglas Prince achieved a sculptural presentation of photographs by spacing and superimposing translucent film images. Jerry Uelsmann, using darkroom techniques he called ‘post-visualization’, created fantasized images by combining exposures of different negatives. Robert Fichter printed on gum bichromate, using cyanotype with watercolor washes to magnify emotional content within the photographic image.

Hirsch points out that Western New York was a hotbed of photographic experimentation. Minor White, working at George Eastman House and teaching at Rochester Institute of Technology in the 50’s and 60’s, “nurtured the belief that there was no chain of command in the arts and that ‘alternative’ paths could be pursued at any point of the creative process”. John Wood combined images from magazines, newspapers, and television to make pieces of powerful political content. Betty Hahn printed on fabric with gum bichromate and used stitching or over-painting to personalize iconographic images. Robert Hirsch himself challenged ideas about traditional photography by manipulating the exposure of film, the negative, and the printing process, all to create elements of expressionism that, otherwise, might only have existed by accident. Other New York artists including Judith Harold-Steinhauser, Bea Nettles, William Larson, and Thomas Barrows violated processes at every stage of making a photograph, and after, to make personal statements about their subjects.

Similarly, Lucas Samaras, Judith Golden, Robert Flint, Pat Ward, Dinh Q Le, Tatana Kellner, David Levinthal and Garry Trudeau, Robert Parke Harrison, Mike and Doug Starn, Vik Muniz and others have invented ways of using photographs rather than simply making them. Perhaps the most prolific and successful artist using multiple media including photography has been Robert Rauschenberg. His complex flat and sculptural pieces pull meaning from their photographic imagery while at the same time enhancing those images with other superimposed or juxtaposed materials.

Holly Roberts, like most if not all of these artists, entered the field of handmade photography by a unique portal. She was not, to a great extent, influenced by art based on altered photographs. Rather, she received a multitude of influences from artists in varied disciplines, occurring over the entire span of her career. Her major influences reflect her primary concerns in making art: the identification of emotional, psychological, or spiritual realities, and the uncovering of such realities that may be hidden or denied.

In photography, she was most affected by the work of two artists who used traditional techniques: Diane Arbus and Ralph Eugene Meatyard. About Arbus, John Szarkowski, of The Museum of Modern Art, wrote: “[Her pictures] are concerned with private rather than social realities, with psychological rather than visual coherence, with the prototypical and mythic rather than the topical and temporal. Her real subject is no less than the unique interior lives of those she photographed.”2 The same concerns motivate Roberts.

Meatyard’s images of family members and acquaintances wearing Halloween masks appealed to Roberts’ belief in phenomena of transformation that may occur in ordinary people. Roberts lived for eight years on the Zuni Reservation in Western New Mexico, where Zuni beliefs reinforced her own intuition about our capacity for a spiritual occupation of multiple entities. In the Zuni religion, after extensive prayer and fasting, dancers “personate” the gods in the form of kachinas. Though Roberts may have known the “personator” as a normal Zuni man in everyday life, his transformation to a god in ceremony was, for her, complete.

Roberts traveled extensively throughout the Southwest to view and photograph rock art made by the ancestors of the Pueblos and other Peoples in the Four Corners states. These ancient figures were as strong an influence as any in the development of her painted, iconographic forms. Human and animal representations on Mimbres pottery, likewise, fed her fascination with spiritual transformation, which is evident in so many of her painted photographs of the 80’s and 90’s, and even the work she does today.

These primitive, symbolic forms created by indigenous artists share a similarity with some of the imagery made by contemporary self-taught artists. Roberts counts as one of her major recent influences the work of folk artist Bill Traylor. Very much like the Mimbres figures, there is a certainty about Traylor’s depictions of human and animal forms, and an elegance to their placement, their color, and their juxtaposition with other forms within the field. Roberts’s images, with some notable recent exceptions, are similarly spare and deceptively simple.

Painters, in terms of both painting technique and imagery content, are among Roberts’ greatest influences. Writing about Joan Brown, Jacquelynn Bass of the Berkeley Art Museum refers to a “deeply personal, symbolic, and humorous approach” and a “philosophy of intimate personal engagement with the viewer”.3 “Personal engagement” is a hallmark of other painters who attracted and influenced Roberts: David Hockney, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and, in comparison with other artists of his time, even Toulouse Lautrec’s work was often personally revealing. Francisco Clemente, beyond “intimate personal engagement”, shares fundamental similarities with Roberts in the content of his work. Michael Auping of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery refers to “the connections and cross-references between his autobiographical analysis, mutating self-portraits… and odd anatomical expressions combined with his fascination for metaphysical systems…” He writes, “Although Clemente’s works are not narrative or illustrational in any traditional sense, the idea of ‘transformation’ or metamorphosis appears in a good deal of his imagery.”4

Other artists who have influenced Roberts combine “personal, symbolic, and humorous” attributes in the same spirit as Joan Brown. A fellow Bay Area artist and contemporary of Brown’s was Bob Arneson, a ceramic sculptor who embodied all three of these qualities in his work, even after a diagnosis of cancer that eventually proved fatal. The work had a powerful effect on Roberts when she saw it at the Oakland Art Museum. Its impact on her was both cause and effect of her working philosophy. There is humor in almost all of Roberts’ work. Humor may save her work from being too emotional, too tragic, too horrific or too morbid. In combination with those elements, her humor is often ironic, more so than it is black.

For almost three decades the photograph has had an essential presence in Roberts’ work, and thus identifies her most closely with other artists in the school of handmade photography. But her influences derive from myriad sources, most of which come from artists outside her “school”, many of which, such as intuitiveness, emotionality, and humor, come from her own nature.