Consequences of being brings together large-format paintings, works on paper, and— for the first time in Deborah Roberts’ career—ceramic sculpture. The exhibition marks a significant expansion of the Austin, Texas–based artist’s practice and a deepening investigation into the histories and legacies of colonialism. Roberts, who received her MFA from Syracuse University, uses collage to approach identity as something fragmented and continually reconstructed, reclaiming found materials and images to examine how Black bodies are seen, positioned, and understood globally.
The project broadens Roberts’ historical lens to include Germany, the Netherlands, and South Africa—nations deeply implicated in the exploitation of land and people. In these new works, she repurposes imagery and text from grocery store signage and packaging, referencing foods once discarded or given to enslaved peoples that are now reframed as delicacies. Through these transformations, Roberts considers how colonial histories continue to shape cultural identity, economic access, and the politics of consumption. While her figures bear traces of dehumanizing language and imagery, they are also imbued with presence, dignity, and spirituality, asserting survival and self-definition.
Roberts constructs her hybrid figures—often young Black children—through a distinctive collage process that combines found, manipulated, drawn, and painted elements. Drawn from the social and economic environments these children must navigate, the imagery foregrounds the precarity imposed by racial stereotyping and its impact on identity and agency. Her signature expanses of white space isolate the figures, intensifying attention to how Black bodies are centered, measured, and read in relation to structures of whiteness.
The exhibition also debuts a new ceramic bust, Zuri, named after the Swahili word for “beautiful” or “good,” affirming enduring cultural lineages and the inherent value, brilliance, and potential of Black children.
About the Artist:
Deborah Roberts was born in Austin, Texas, USA in 1962 where she continues to live and work. Roberts’ use of collage reflects the challenges encountered by young Black children as they strive to build their identity, particularly as they respond to preconceived social constructs perpetuated by the Black community, the white gaze and visual culture at large. Combining a range of different facial features, skin tones, hairstyles and clothes, Roberts explains that “with collage, I can create a more expansive and inclusive view of the Black cultural experience.”
Roberts’ solo exhibition What about us? opened at Stephen Friedman Gallery, New York, NY, in November 2023. This coincided with the launch of her new monograph, 20 Years of Art/Work published by Radius Books. Other recent solo and two-person exhibitions include those at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico (2023); McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (2022) and The Bluecoat, Liverpool, UK (2021). The artist’s major touring exhibition I’m opened at The Contemporary Austin, Texas in January 2021, following the installation of her first outdoor public mural there in September 2020. The show travelled to Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Colorado; Art + Practice in collaboration with California African American Museum, Los Angeles, California and Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, Florida (2021–22). Her work featured in the touring exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which first opened at Frist Art Museum, Nashville, Tennessee (2023).
Roberts was named 2023 Texas Medal of Arts Award Honoree for the Visual Arts. She was a finalist in the 2019 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and her work was exhibited in the accompanying show The Outwin 2019: American Portraiture Today, which toured from the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (2019-2021). The Anonymous Was a Woman Award was presented to Roberts in December 2018, a prize granted each year to ten female artists over the age of 40 in the USA and at a critical juncture in their career. She was a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2016 and was an Artist-in-Residence at The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Florida in 2019.
Deborah Roberts
It can’t be love, 2025
Mixed media collage on canvas, 54 x 45 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Deborah Roberts
Hands in the air, 2025
Mixed media collage on canvas, 72 x 48 inches
Courtesy of the artist
Deborah Roberts: Consequences of being was organized by The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY.
The Everson is supported by the General Operating Support program, a regrant program of the County of Onondaga with the support of County Executive, J. Ryan McMahon II, and the Onondaga County Legislature, administered by CNY Arts; and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
