Copyright Case Between Artists Deborah Roberts and Lynthia Edwards Continues Without a Victory for Either Side

A copyright infringement lawsuit between two collage artists, Debroah Roberts and Lynthia Edwards, has been handed down a decision that mirrors the decoupage of a collage artist’s practice.

In September 2022 Roberts sued Edwards, her dealer Richard Beavers, and his eponymous gallery accusing them of “willful copyright infringement.” The two artists both work with collage, often using young Black girls as focal points in their work.

Early the following year, Edwards filed a countersuit, in which her attorney’s claimed Roberts was “punching down on an emerging artist in order to stifle market competition and eliminate a competitive threat.” Edwards asked that the case be dismissed.

This month, according to Artnet News, which first reported on the filing, Judge LaShann DeArcy Hall of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York wrote a decision denying Edwards’ motion to dismiss. But Hall’s decision was not entirely in agreement with Roberts either. Of the 16 works disputed in the case, the judge found that nine did not amount to copyright infringement, while the other seven were close enough in “total concept and feel of each collage is sufficiently similar to defeat a motion to dismiss.”

Roberts is by far the more successful of the two artists. She is represented by Stephan Friedman Gallery while Edwards is represented by the much smaller Richard Beavers Gallery. Roberts has her work in the collections of institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney Museum, whereas Edwards’s CV solely lists private collectors that own her work, among them Beth Rudin DeWoody.

In her original lawsuit, Roberts claimed that Edwards, along with that artist’s dealer, Richard Beavers, plotted to move in on her market by purposefully making work that looked like Robert’s. 

“She’s definitely coping me in fact using the same images as me,” Roberts told artist Gio Swaby, who had confused a work by Edwards for one made by Roberts at the 2021 edition of the Untitled Art fair in Miami.

Edwards and Beavers’s countersuit called Roberts’s complaint an attempt “to destroy [their] reputations and livelihoods” and argued that Roberts does not have a trademark on “creating collage works with Black subjects.”

At the time, Maaren Shah, a partner at the law firm Quinn Emanuel, which represents both Edwards and Roberts, told ARTnews that Roberts’s complaint was simply “about more established artists and galleries misusing their power to suppress new creation and growth. We filed these counterclaims to protect our clients’ rights to create and sell art that is no less worthy than the art that came before it.”

Roberts’ attorney Gregory Clarick of Clarick Gueron Reisbaum told ARTnews in an email that “the Court’s ruling unequivocally advances our copyright infringement claims… Notably, the ruling speaks to the fundamental issue of our case—Edwards’s copying of Roberts’s creative and aesthetic decisions—despite earlier claims by the Edwards/Beavers legal team that the issue was just about similar ‘styles’ and that both artists work in collage and look to similar art historical sources.  Instead, as the Court explained, the copyright law protects the ‘total concept and feel’ of an artist’s work and that’s exactly what Edwards has copied here.”