In 1991 the family moved to Chicago, Illinois so that Wilson could complete his post doctoral work in sports medicine.
The second source, which gets closer to the meaning of her work, is a conceptualization of human emotions, cultural history and interpersonal relationships.
The images that include horses, deer, birds and other animals frequently reflect the emotional concerns of the other works.”[4] Her painted photographs have a psychological overtone.
Guided by her imagination and emotional responses to the landscape, Roberts breathes additional life and narrative into her photographs, turning clouds, birds, snakes, gravel and trees into compelling works of art.
Her finished pieces are deeply layered, both in a physical sense and in the stories woven by her intentional choice of characters, scenery, color palette, and title.
Roberts masterfully brings together ideas of mortality and birth, longing and comfort, spirituality and humanity, disguised by humor or through a lighthearted aesthetic.
[13] “Roberts is clearly drawn in a more general sense to primitive art [...] her striving for simplicity within the images and her use of figures internally charged with meaning but freed from an enveloping environment are other aspects of this borrowing”[4] In 1973 Holly Roberts worked at Tamarind Institute for four years as a curator.
After receiving her MFA from Arizona State University, she and her husband lived on the Zuni Indian Reservation where Roberts worked on her painted photographs and had two daughters, Ramey and Teal.