Arts and Entertainment

THE BUZZ: Art Profile about Marie Roberts at The Art Room

July 25, 2012 Editorial Staff
BROOKLYN MEDIA GROUP/ Photo by Melisa Stumpf
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The artist responsible for the last 15 years of iconic Coney Island imagery will be debuting her evocative banners in Bay Ridge next month.

Born in Coney Island in 1954, and raised in a sideshow family, Marie Roberts comes by her interest naturally.

“My family has been here [in Coney Island, Brooklyn] since 1919,” said the artist, who studied painting and drawing at CUNY and is currently a professor of alternative art at Fairleigh Dickinson University, in New Jersey. Her uncle Lester was the talker for the Dreamland Circus sideshow; her other two uncles, Harry and Guy, were the electricians the night of the tremendous Dreamland fire in the 1920s, and her grandfather was a firefighter who battled the blaze that same night.

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“I thought it was normal for people to be involved with sideshows, but nobody understood my background,” Roberts said. “The ghosts and freaks’ stories were real to me.”

Roberts became overwhelmed and ran away from sideshow life to attend art school. She exhibited in Manhattan in the mid-90s, but it wasn’t until many years later that she decided to come back. The turning point was meeting Dick Zigun, the founder of Coney Island USA.

“I read an article in the paper about a guy from Yale doing a sideshow,” she noted. “In talking and writing back and forth, he said he needed to get somebody to paint banners. And I just fell in love with it. I’d always wanted to do public art.”

Roberts said she had “never met anyone as interested in Coney Island[as Zigun]… who understood the other part of [her] life.”

Her connection to Bay Ridge is also vivid. As a as a young girl, she remembers seeing the Bay Ridge Community Council’s Halloween Window Painting Contest. Her dad used to drive her, and she says she “can’t remember not going.” Roberts always dreamt of having her art on a window in Bay Ridge.

“I wished I could do something like that,” she added. “I feel lucky [now], and wonder if my interest came from looking at window paintings.

“I never knew it could be so satisfying,” Roberts went on. “I’m making my own place beautiful by painting banners and I’m honoring my family, who instilled this love for sideshow in me.”

Painting sideshow banners in Coney Island, Robert says has allowed her to “see my past [as a little girl], my present, and the ghosts of my uncles Harry and Lester.

“This is rich, fertile, ground,” Roberts stressed

Her sideshow banners along with dozens of never-before-seen watercolors will be on display and for sale on an art exhibit at The Art Room, 8710 Third Avenue when her show opens, on Saturday, August 4th from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

“This will be an opportunity to show a range of what it is that I do,” Roberts said.


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