The artist Lynthia Edwards has filed a counterclaim against artist Deborah Roberts for alleged defamation amid the latter’s heated lawsuit against her and her gallery, the Richard Beavers Gallery, alleging copyright infringement.
Edwards filed her counterclaim on March 11 seeking unspecified damages, the reimbursement of legal fees and an injunction to bar Roberts from further alleged defamation. It is the latest and most significant development in the case since Roberts filed her initial lawsuit in 2022.
In introducing her counterclaim, lawyers for Edwards wrote that she was raised in Alabama and that her art—mixed media works inspired by quilting and collage—is rooted in her upbringing as a Black girl in the South. Edwards’s lawyers revealed that, unbeknownst to her, Roberts was monitoring her art practice through a private investigator.
Roberts, in her earlier lawsuit, alleged that Edwards was enlisted by the Richard Beavers Gallery to copy her works. Edwards’s counterclaim is rooted in the assertion that Roberts “used a barrage of social media posts and private messages to spread her false conspiracy theory” and even deter the lesser-known artist from showing at Expo Chicago and the Park Avenue Armory Show.
Edwards’s lawyers said in her counterclaim that the two artists share common influences, including the Black collage artist Romare Bearden and the German Dada collage artist Hannah Höch, a point they previously made in a memorandum last year answering the lawsuit. Her lawyers said the works by the two artists only bear “superficial similarity.”
“Emboldened by the success of her big lie, Roberts has gone so far as to claim that Edwards has copied Roberts’s more recent use of black backgrounds in her works, which Roberts has said she began during COVID,” Edwards’s lawyers said. They pointed to a post made on Instagram by a previous gallery that represented Edwards, showing one of her collages with a black background as far back as 2019, before the onset of the pandemic.
Edwards’s counterclaim also adds a third-party defendant not party to Roberts’s initial lawsuit. That defendant is New York gallerist Stephen Friedman who represents Roberts and allegedly discussed with her in 2022 how her rival was “gaining ground in [her] market.” Friedman allegedly helped Roberts spread her “big lie.”
The counterclaim additionally provides samples of drawings Edwards made in 2013 after completing her master’s degree in art education. The drawings depict Black youth with some elements of collage against solid backgrounds, though are not quite precisely the look seen in her later works contested by Roberts, such as the 2020 collage Pinky Swear Promise. A review of Roberts’s Instagram shows her posting in such a style as far back as 2015. And Edwards’s counterclaim admits Beavers admired her work and bought two pieces in 2018.
But, as the counterclaim focuses primarily on defamation, Edwards’s lawyers shared a transcript of a voicemail to Beavers from Roberts shortly after he began representing the artist.
“I see that you’re representing that girl in Pinson, Alabama who is ripping off my work. And I did get an attorney on her. We researched. She has no money. That’s the only reason I haven’t sued her,” Roberts allegedly said in the voicemail. “But I’m telling you right now: If she continues to show my work and do my work, I’m gonna make it public. Public. The New York Times. I don’t care what I have to do. I’m gonna squash this.”
When Beavers called Roberts back and pushed for the two artists to talk and resolve the matter, Roberts allegedly declined the offer and suggested her “White galleries” would go after him. The counterclaim includes a copy of text messages sent between Roberts and Jonathan Horrocks of the Stephen Friedman Gallery in which they seeming to mock Edwards for wearing jeans with holes. Horrocks promised her the dispute would soon end.
Then, in April 2022, a representative for Friedman’s gallery under his direction allegedly contacted David Zwirner Gallery and the website platformart.com requesting that Edwards’s art be removed from the website. Zwirner’s gallery and the affiliated website complied. Roberts allegedly celebrated that as a “power move” in texts to Horrocks, then commented on it in a live video shared to her fans.
“Let them shame him,” Horrocks said of Beavers in a message to Roberts as online commenters allegedly began repeating her claim that her work had been copied.
And when Beavers took Edwards’s art to Expo Chicago that month, he was only permitted to show her work when efforts by Roberts’s gallery representative Susanne Vielmetter to have her work excluded were unsuccessful, the court documents show. “Too bad that creep gallery and his stooge are allowed to show at the @expochicago,” Roberts allegedly said using a fake account after she called on others to “call him out and the artist.”
Roberts allegedly referred to Edwards as a “hoe” and the “bitch who’s copying me” in public and private messages, before recruiting the celebrated artist Amy Sherald in her alleged defamation efforts.
“This is ridiculous,” Sherald commented in a post celebrating Edwards’s art on social medial. “It’s a straight up Deborah Roberts copy.”
Beavers was excluded from the art fair Untitled in Miami in 2022 after he previously participated in 2020 and 2021. His gallery was initially declined by Expo Chicago in 2023 because of the Roberts controversy but only admitted after ordered not to exhibit Edwards’s work. It was excluded from the Park Avenue Armory shows in 2022 and 2023 after intervention by Vielmetter.
“Roberts had no interest in taking action against Edwards when her works were selling in Mississippi and Georgia for a few hundred dollars each,” the counterclaim read. “But once they started selling for thousands of dollars each in New York, Roberts determined that she had to ‘squash this’—before Edwards became a threat to her own sales in the hundreds of thousands. That, for Deborah Roberts and her galleries, is the ‘business of art.’”
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