Meet Deborah
Using vernacular, ethnographic and medical photographs from the early 20th century as source material, Deborah Grayson examines historical archives to trace Black women’s life-stories.
Moving between figuration and abstraction, the historical and the intergalactic, the spiritual and the profane, Grayson uses printmaking and drawing to re/animate the rich but neglected and sometimes quiet stories of Black women's lives.
In her work Grayson builds an archive of images and artifacts that reflect Black women’s experiences and expressions of love, desire, ambition, hunger, vulnerability, spirituality, fear and joy. In particular, Grayson is interested in examining both quiet and silence as modes of Black women’s expressiveness and what they both reveal and protect about the inner lives of Black women in order to enable a more nuanced understanding of their lives. Ink, graphite, wood and paper are among the tools Grayson finds useful to do this creative and documentary work.
The detailed work of carving, etching and drawing, combined with the variety of ways she presents color, volume, tone and texture, allows Grayson to contribute to the cultural production among artists and thinkers interested in creating an archival imaginary – an imagination of the future that is conceived through what was possible in the past – to envision narratives about Black women’s lives that are neither violently annotated nor redacted. Following Caswell and others, rather than just “documenting a more diverse past based on identities of the present,” Grayson’s work focuses on connecting the untold or misinterpreted stories of Black women’s histories to craft different trajectories for the present and future.