Collection: Roger J. Carter Collection

Roger J. Carter brings a powerful, playful, and deeply symbolic dimension to the exhibition through his mixed-media portraits constructed from toys, Legos, and found objects. His practice fuses the accessibility of childhood materials with urgent social commentary. Carter transforms familiar playthings—plastic soldiers, building blocks, action figures— into textured reliefs that interrogate themes of Black identity, resilience, power, and representation.

His work often reimagines iconic Black cultural figures—activists, artists, thinkers— rendering them with layered, sculptural surfaces that shift between nostalgia, disruption, and reverence. The colorful compositions seduce the viewer in, only to reveal complex tensions: who is seen, who is heard, what histories get built or erased. Carter’s aesthetic bridges pop culture and fine art, casting toys as agents in visual storytelling.

He recently was spotlighted in The New Yorker for a feature titled “Roger J. Carter Rebel Revolutionary”, profiling a short film about his process and the philosophical underpinnings of his work. The New Yorker piece frames Carter’s portraits as battlegrounds of memory and identity, illuminating how small, everyday objects can speak to larger struggles for visibility and self-definition. Carter’s work has been featured in national exhibitions and critical forums, earning recognition for its originality, technical mastery, and capacity to spark dialogue between object, image, and meaning. In the context of the fair, his portraits invite viewers to reconsider what is playful, what is serious—and how the personal is always political.