About

ARTIST STATEMENT

“My work is grounded in a studio practice of painting and drawing, creating lush saturated paintings that speak to the intersection of pleasure and human impact. Layers of botanical line drawing offer specific observation, and in other works pure fluid abstraction offers a meditative visual space. The vibrance in my work is inspired by the colors of tropical plant forms, ocean layers, and light, celebrating the energy of place while questioning
how we experience and identify it in this epoch.” @cynthiaroberts_studio.

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Cynthia Roberts is a visual artist represented by the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. Roberts’ paintings combine lush saturated abstraction, with precisely drawn botanical forms, examining the complexity of beauty in our epoch. Detailed drawings surface and submerge in richly saturated color fields. This spring 2025 she will continue her art research, creating a series of studies on site at the Guiniguada Art Residency on the island of Gran Canaria. In June of 2024 Roberts exhibited new paintings from the Suffusion series at Bromfield; she created studies for those works at a residency in Costa Rica with the Mauser Foundation in January of 2024. In November 2022, her solo exhibition Mutualism: New Paintings was on view at the Bromfield Gallery in Boston. Roberts’ painting series The Akumal Papers, was exhibited in a solo exhibition at the Spencer Presentation Gallery in the fall of 2020-Jan 2021 at the Walter J. Manninen Center for the Arts at Endicott College, These works, created largely on site at the Tortuga Escondida artist residency in Akumal, Mexico, document where place becomes presence. In the fall of 2020, Roberts was an Artist in Residence on Governors Island in New York City at Triangle Arts, igniting an investigation of the role of the oyster in ocean and human ecosystems, which continues to inform her work in the Suffusion series. Roberts is a laureate of the Regards Croisés//Criss Cross: NY//Le Havre residency program and production grant, with support of the French Institute, the City of Le Havre. She was an Artist in Residence in the City of Le Havre, France for the fall of 2012.

Roberts was full-time faculty Endicott College since 2006, nominated in 2012 for the college-wide Excellence in Teaching Award, leaving a full professorship in Studio Art in 2020 to relocate to Upstate New York and dedicate to studio work full-time.

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Roberts also works with choreographers to create projects with immersive sound-activated video projection environments, and designs elements that are worn by performers and installed in the space. She is the co-founder of Armations, a dance/art collective creating multimedia live performances as well as site-specific works, workshops, and exhibitions, with choreographer and lifetime collaborator, Nikki Sao Pedro-Welch. @armations

Cynthia received her MFA in Painting from Pratt Institute, and a BA in English with a focus on British Romanticism and Honors in Creative Writing from Brown University.