Artist Deborah Roberts Receives Mixed Ruling in Contentious Copyright Dispute
Eileen Kinsella November 5, 2024 Share Share This Article
A federal judge has weighed in on an ongoing copyright infringement lawsuit brought by a sought-after contemporary artist against a Brooklyn dealer and an artist in his gallery stable.
The case is complex and so is the ruling. The judge partially denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case, because she found that some of the artworks in question are “sufficiently similar” or “substantially similar” for the infringement claims to proceed. But for other works in question, she agreed that “no reasonable jury… could find that the two works are substantially similar.”
The artist who brought the lawsuit is Texas-based Deborah Roberts, who became famous and commercially successful with her collage-based portraits of Black children in various formats and styles. Her work is held in several prestigious U.S. museums and she currently has gallery representation in both the U.S. and the U.K. At auction, her work has achieved a record price of $275,000, set in 2021.
