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 and hints of figurative forms offer specific observation, as the fluid abstraction offers a meditative visual space and suggest the fluids circulating in our bodies. The vibrance in my work is inspired by the colors of tropical plant forms, ocean layers, and light, celebrating the energy of place and being while questioning
how we experience and identify these things 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 and painted botanical forms, examining the complexity of beauty in our era. Detailed drawings surface and submerge in richly saturated color fields. In the spring of 2025 she continued her art research, creating a series of studies on site at the Guiniguada Art Residency on the island of Gran Canaria off the coast of Western Sahara. In June of 2026 Roberts will exhibit new paintings from the Mango Season series at Bromfield Gallery. She has had two previous solo exhibitions at Bromfield in 2024 Suffusion, based on work begun at the Mauser Foundation International Artist Residency in Costa Rica, and 2022 Mutualism, work exploring ecosystematic empathy, following a residency on Governors Island NYC. Following her move to Upstate NY, Roberts was honored to have her painting series The Akumal Papers exhibited at the Spencer Presentation Gallery in the fall of 2020-Jan 2021 at Endicott College, where she had been full-time faculty in Studio Art. These works, created largely on site at the Tortuga Escondida artist residency in Akumal, Mexico, document how place becomes presence, through large-scale washy stained drawings. 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, where she had a 2-person exhibit at the André Malraux Museum of Contemporary Art along with a collaborative performace with dance company La BaZooKa. 

Roberts was full-time faculty at 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. In 2027, Cynthia will be reuniting with her long-time choreographic collaborator Nikki Sao Pedro-Welch in a multimedia visual/dance production with their collaboration as Armations, alongside a solo exhibition at Endicott’s Heftler Gallery in the Walter J. Manninen Center for the Arts.

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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 | www.armartions.org

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.