Malik Roberts: Glory
Photos by Sarah Tekele || Styling by James LaMar. Originally published in AphroChic magazine Issue 4, Summer 2020.
On a nondescript stretch of Broadway in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, stands a print shop empty of customers or seemingly anything to sell. It is a miracle establishment, not unlike the neighborhood it sits in. You wonder how it has survived Amazon and gentrification, and you wonder for how much longer.
It is a frigid day in mid-February, as, above the print shop, I arrive at a large warehouse full of artists’ studios. I walk into one and find myself surrounded by a majesty of blues and grays and flashes of gemstone colors. Bootsy Collins’ tonal gyrations sing out across the studio as I am greeted by a slippered Malik Roberts, paintbrush in hand, wearing his trademark hat and glasses and a smile so warm and genuine that, for a moment, I am genuinely taken aback.
This authenticity, a willingness to be real, is most apparent in Roberts’ work. BLK & BLUE, his 2018 show at ABYX gallery, was inspired by Picasso’s Blue period. But more poignantly, it is a telling description of what it is to be Black in America — an explora- tion of the damage wrought from a dueling existence that demands our strength as much it denies our pain. Using a palette of blues and grays, Roberts pulls back the thin veil that covers mental illness in the Black community. Familiar scenes and tropes of Black existence are contextualized in classical forms and dismantled, bringing into sharp relief the truth that was there all along.
Recently, I asked Malik about his current work as he sat in front of a piece in progress, adding delicate inflections of paint on a folded brown thigh.
AC: You met the Pope — how did you even get to the Vatican?
MR: My mentor Domingo (the artist Domingo Zapata), called me right after BLK & BLU. He called me randomly, “Papa I’m doing something with the Pope ... give me a painting, give me any painting!” I was like “ok”, so I just sent him a picture of a painting. Then he was like you’re going to have to pull up to the UN for a charity event. So I was like cool, I pull up to the UN, and that’s how I ended up giving my speech at the UN. [Then] after, he was like “Papa, if someone buys your painting (at the charity event) the Vatican will fly you and the person who buys the painting out there.” So time passes by then he calls me up, “Are you ready to go to the Vatican March 21?” That’s pretty much how it went down.
AC: Do you think about where that painting is now?
MR: They said they were going to put it into a little private thing called the archives. So, in a hundred years when they are going through the archives at The Vatican, they are going to see some painting of a Black man on the cross. They are gonna pull up a picture of the artist and see a nigga with grills ... It was a big moment.
AC: Your parents are from Trinidad and Guyana, but you were raised in the US. Do you think that plays into how you view Blackness, especially with these different points of cultural reference?
MR: I feel that a lot — even just growing up between New York and the South — gave me a whole different perspective on blackness. Because in the South, the racism is more outward and up here it’s a little more hidden. So even the whole thing about what it means to be Black in the South, is a whole different thing than what it means to be Black in the North. Which is funny to say, because it sounds like we are talking about some Civil War shit. But it’s that way.
AC: You didn’t go through any formal training; you are essentially self-taught?
MR: Yeah, other than my family who knows how to draw. I had an uncle who went to college for art. I stayed with him for a summer and he gave me a boot camp, if you will. In the basement he had a little studio setup. [In it] he had a stack of Playboys from 1960 to now; and a bunch of Double XL; a bunch of Source Magazines and he would tell me to go through all that shit and by the time he [got] home to draw something from it. I would go through the images and would try to draw something. He would come home [and] look at it ... look at the original picture and be like, “I don’t like that. Do it again.” I’d be like ... Ok,” and then I would do it again. Then he would come home the next day — look at the picture — and be like, “I don’t know ... Try it one more time.” Then the next day he would come home and he would look at all three images and he would [be] like, “Yeah, this is the one.” Then he would go across all three and [say] “Do you see the difference between [them]? The nose in this one was a little off; you fucked up the eye on this one”... He did this to me for weeks and weeks and weeks, and by the end I got pretty good at looking and drawing. But that was the only schooling I [had].
AC: Tell us about Glory. What inspired this new work?
MR: Glory is like the new decade. We are on the other side, we are understand- ing ourselves more, we understand our issues and our flaws, [and] we are on the other side building to a more glorious pre- sentation within ourselves. There’s more than just Oprah. There’s a lot of other people in these boardrooms, and a lot of people making decisions [who] are more relatable to us. Black women are the number one business owners. We are really taking a hold of our future, and now everything is televised, so you can’t really do us like you did [in] Black Wall St. So it’s more of a scary time for them because you can’t really just hush hush niggas like that. You can silence one or two and try and get away with it, but you can’t silence niggas like that. So I believe this decade is going to be the decade that we really strive, and really prosper in a real way. We are here and we have been here, but now it’s just on a grander scale. I just want to be the artist that represents us as we [get] to this grander scale, as we are making this transition. Black is beautiful, and can be seen in this light: We can highlight our features, we can highlight our hair, we can highlight our noses, we can highlight our big lips. We can show our style off. I feel like a lot of the things they try to put us down about are really just showing us our glory.
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