Linda Foard Roberts: Lament

Auteur
Linda Foard Roberts' work is deeply personal, rooted in memory, family and local histories, combined with philosophical inquiries about life, death, and basic human rights. Roberts is a recipient of a 2020 Guggenheim Fellowship in support of her project LAMENT, a song of sorrow for those not heard.
In 2008 she was a recipient of a North Carolina Artist Fellowship. Over the years, her projects have been mined from her personal connection to nature, humanity, and family. Using 8 x 10 and 5 x 7 cameras and preferring the imperfections of old lenses and the history inherent within them, her work is metaphorical and layered, intending to cross language and cultural barriers.
Posing the environment as a reflection of ourselves, her photographs engage the transformative cycles that shape our lives, bound by time and what it means to be human, a foundation upon which we can all find common ground.
Roberts' first monograph, Passage, published by Radius Books (OP), represents a ten-year project that weaves together images and writings that explore the inevitable movement of time in life. Photographs from Roberts' current project, LAMENT, a song of sorrow for those not heard, have been seen in exhibitions at the Mint Museum: Responsibilities of Representing (2020-23) and W/ALLS: Defend, Divide and the Divine (2020), exhibited at the Annenberg Space for Photography, Los Angeles, California (2019), and SOCO Gallery paired with Hank Willis Thomas' Love Over Rules in the adjoining room. Photographs from this series are in the collections of The Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina and The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia. Divided in Death from this series has been published in the book, Black Civil War Soldier, a visual history of conflict and citizenship by Deborah Willis, Ph.D. Show Additional Fields

Michelle serves as the first executive director of North Carolina's African American Heritage Commission, which strives to preserve, promote, and protect the state's African American history, arts, and culture for all people. With roots in North Carolina on both sides of her family, she has familial ties to Historic Stagville, the state's African American Music Trail, the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum (Palmer Memorial Institute), Black Wall Street, and many of the state's historically black colleges and universities. Michelle received her undergraduate degree at Spelman College under the renowned Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole. Her graduate degree, in Folklore, with an emphasis on African Diaspora and Black Southern life, was attained at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her career in cultural heritage preservation began with community-based work in Orange, Durham, and Alamance counties and continued through her work as an educator at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University. Michelle began working as curator of multicultural initiatives for the Division of State Historic Sites in 2006. In 2008, with a team of colleagues, she helped to create, by general statute, the state's African American Heritage Commission (AAHC). From 2012 to present she has served as a member of the senior staff of the NC Arts Council, where the AAHC is based. Michelle's work has taken her to Panama and Ghana to document African Diaspora funerary traditions, and her ethnographic work in a Carolina Gullah community led to her role as a liaison to the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. She has had the honor of growing the impact of two cultural heritage trails--The African American Music Trails of Eastern North Carolina and Freedom Roads. Additionally, she has worked in leadership roles with several initiatives funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, including the Gathering Place Project and the Green Books' Oasis Spaces. In 2017, Michelle was invited by Yale's Gilder Lehrman Institute to join a collective of thought leaders in public history. Michelle continues to use her background as a folklorist, public historian, documentary educator, oral historian, and cultural preservationist to connect communities to the rich and transformative power of North Carolina's African American heritage.

Texte du rabat
Lament, a song of sorrow for those not heard, connects the tangibility of history and the geography of memory in the American South.

Through contemporary photographs, historical essays, personal stories, and critical quotes, Linda Foard Roberts's latest book explores the ways history exists all around us, whether tangible or intangible. Employing Civil War era technology—a 8-x-10-inch view camera with a Darlot brass barrel lens—for this project Roberts visited sites across the American South where important, sometimes devastating, events in social history took place. This use of historic technology invokes the temporal merging that she seeks to capture in her work—the overlays of evidence of our past and present. 

Roberts sees her photographic efforts as an ongoing contribution to truth-seeking by pointing out the silent stories encoded in our surroundings. Her work examines life, death, basic human rights, and excavations of narratives invisibly embedded in our lives.