NEW YORK, NY.- The FLAG Art Foundation opens Consequences of being, an exhibition of new work by Deborah Roberts, on the ninth floor. Bringing together large-format paintings, works on paper and, for the first time in her career, ceramic sculpture, the exhibition signals an expansion of Roberts’s practice and the intensification of her research into the history of colonialism.

Continuing to use collage to explore identity as something that can be fragmented and rebuilt while reclaiming found materials and images in the process, in these new works Roberts focuses on how Black bodies are seen, positioned and understood on a global scale. Consequences of being broadens the historical scope of Roberts’s reflection on the impact of colonialism on Black communities to encompass the histories of Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa—nations deeply implicated in the exploitation of both land and people. In these new paintings and works on paper she repurposes and ultimately transforms the imagery and text of grocery store signage, referencing foods once discarded or given to enslaved peoples that have now been reconsidered as delicacies by contemporary standards. Roberts explores how these legacies continue to shape cultural identity, economic access and the politics of consumption today. Though she addresses the historical experience of dehumanization faced by Black communities—affixing to her figures linguistic traces from food packaging, for example—she also imbues her subjects with presence and spirituality, suggesting that instead of continuing to be erased or co-opted, they may survive and even flourish on terms of their own making.

Roberts’s paintings and works on paper are built through a unique approach to collage that combines found and manipulated images with hand-drawn and painted details to create figures—young Black girls and boys—that are fundamentally hybrid in nature. By constructing her subjects with imagery drawn from the social and economic worlds they must navigate, Roberts foregrounds the precarity these children so often face due to racial stereotyping, a process that can limit or restrict the development of their identities and sense of agency. She further emphasizes the isolation and objectification of the body through her signature compositional approach that sees each figure or group of figures surrounded by or set within an expanse of white, empty space, an effect that heightens our attention to the way Black bodies are centered, measured and read in relation to whiteness, a structure that relegates them to second-class citizenship.

The exhibition will feature the debut of a new ceramic sculpture, Zuri. A bust of a young girl, Zuri takes its name from the Swahili word meaning ‘beautiful’ or ‘good,’ with the association serving as affirmation of the cultural lineages and ancestral traditions that Black communities continue to draw from. By presenting Black children at scale and requiring viewers to look downward rather than upward, these sculptures highlight the metaphorical position of Black children in the world and as such, they ask the viewer to see what is too often overlooked and what Roberts’s work has always advocated for: the inherent value, potential and brilliance of Black children.

Deborah Roberts: Consequences of being is organized by The FLAG Art Foundation, which gratefully acknowledges the artist, her studio, Stephen Friedman Gallery, and private lenders for their generous loans to this exhibition. A related presentation of Deborah Roberts: Consequences of being, curated by Elizabeth Dunbar, will be on view at the Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY, from May 16-September 27, 2026.

Deborah Roberts was born in Austin, TX, in 1962 where she continues to live and work. Roberts's 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.”

Roxana Marcoci, Senior Curator at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, writes: “In her mixed-media works, artist Deborah Roberts acknowledges the syncretic nature of Black female identity. Debunking societal definitions of ideal beauty and dress, as well as stereotypes of social media, she questions the construction of race and the racializing gaze endemic to Western culture. Her collages and text-based works not only articulate a critique of accepted typologies of the unified self but also affirm the untold value of difference.”

Roberts’s last solo exhibition in New York, What about us?, opened at Stephen Friedman Gallery 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, TX 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, CO; Art + Practice in collaboration with California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA and Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL (2021–22). Her work featured in the touring exhibition Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, which first opened at Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023). Other group projects include those at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2024); Ruby City, San Antonio, TX (2024); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (2024); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2024); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2024); Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY (2024); Harvey B. Gantt Center for African American Arts + Culture, Charlotte, NC (2024); Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Boston, MA (2022); Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Park, Washington, DC (2022); Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Forth Worth, TX (2022); Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA (2021); Scottish National Galleries, Edinburgh, Scotland (2021); Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, Davidson, NC (2020); Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL (2020); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2019) and Somerset House, London, England (2019).

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, FL, in 2019.