LESLIE ROBERTS | I Will Console You With Language | WAITING ROOM
September 21 - October 24, 2025
Text messages, titles of books, signs and ads read on subway trips, image descriptions from social media, email subject lines: these are some lists that, in these paintings, are diagrammed into color and line. I examine the flood of information surrounding us and record words that typically go unnoticed. Then I map handwritten words into forms I couldn’t otherwise invent, applying self-devised rules. Simple systems yield unexpected color, in formations that are pattern-like but satisfyingly irregular. I record the minutiae of ordinary life in search of extraordinary visual experience.
Leslie Roberts makes paintings driven by color, language, and self-devised rules. She has exhibited in the US and abroad, at galleries including Minus Space, Marlborough Gallery, 57W57Arts, Markel Fine Arts, and the Brooklyn Museum in NYC; the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC); and the Hafnarborg Museum (Iceland). She received grants from the Pollock-Krasner and Gottlieb Foundations in 2024. Residencies include Yaddo, Dora Maar House, Ucross, Ragdale, Willapa Bay AIR, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Skowhegan. Roberts holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College. She is Professor Emerita at Pratt Institute. She lives and works in Brooklyn.
PROJECT SPACE
LESLIE ROBERTS | NOW WHAT
November 11 - December 17, 2021
Leslie Roberts charts language into pattern-like works that are diagrams of their own making. She works on thin panels that resemble slates. Each contains a handwritten list compiled from the relentless flow of information surrounding us. Applying self-devised rules, Roberts maps letters into grids of paint, graphite, and ink. Her formal vocabulary encompasses linear networks, geometric shapes, clusters of dots, and dense layers of wash. Roberts began diagramming words two decades ago, as a way to escape her habits of composition. The ordered process of mapping language allows unexpected color relationships, in structures that can suggest glyphs, digital code, or musical scores.
Sources of written lists include email, package labels, text messages, subway ads, online message boards, and instruction manuals. Panels may catalog acronyms, antonyms, bird species, or product names. Some panels document city life through signs and ads seen on the subway or street. Some record intimate text messages. Rosters of news headlines and email subject lines hint at political and social vicissitudes. These mismatched lexicons of contemporary vernacular offer glimpses of everyday life.
The lists and annotations are finally inseparable from the painted patterns they create. Each panel is a record of thinking and making. Viewers may read the panels, or may experience them primarily optically. The writing is a resonant fine print. Roberts examines language in a search to excite the eye.
Leslie Roberts has exhibited her work for three decades, with recent solo exhibitions at Brooklyn’s Minus Space in 2019 and 2016. Her work has also been shown at venues that include the Brooklyn Museum, Davidson Gallery, Deanna Evans Projects, McKenzie Fine Art, Pierogi, PPOW, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, the Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, NC) , and the Wellin Museum (Clinton, NY.) She has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, Ragdale, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Marble House Project, and Skowhegan. She holds a BA from Yale and an MFA from Queens College, and attended the New York Studio School. Roberts has been a professor at Pratt Institute for 35 years, teaching Foundation Light, Color, and Design. She lives and works in Brooklyn.