Celeste
Roberge
School of Art + Art History
Professor
Specialization: Sculpture
T: (352)
273-3086
F: (352)
392-8453
E:
croberge@ufl.edu
Address:
P.O. Box 115801
Gainesville, Fl 32611-5801
View Research Biography
Celeste Roberge is the Coordinator of the Sculpture Area and she teaches all levels of undergraduate and graduate sculpture. She is interested in sculptural concepts relating to the intersection of geological time and human time.
She writes about her work as follows: “A few summers ago, I saw a nineteenth century leather psychiatrist couch at Polly Peter’s Antique Shop in Portland, Maine. The weight and resonance of that couch obsessed me until I began the series Stacks. I was inspired by the absurd desire to embed antique sofas in thousands of pounds of dry-stacked stone in such a way that the furniture would seem like a fossil within a stone road-cut or like an archaic funerary monument extruded from the earth. Although we like to imagine that cultural artifacts, such as furniture and art, exist free of time and decay, the material conditions of the world inevitably recoup them.”
Her most recent solo exhibitions include “Stacks for Home and Office” at A.V.C. Contemporary Art in New York City; “Small Sculptures and Drawings” at June Fitzpatrick Gallery in Portland, Maine; “Quarry” at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine; and “Sitting Room” at the Gulf Coast Museum of Art in Largo, Florida. She was included in a group exhibition of six artists, one from each continent, commissioned to construct site-specific outdoor sculptures for the Off-Site Project, International Stone Sculptors at Expo 2000 in Germany. Her sculpture “Raum/Room” an outdoor living room constructed of sixteen tons of sandstone and antique furniture remains on long term loan to the Schaumburger Quarry in Steinbergen, Germany. Her most recent group exhibition was Home at the d.u.m.b.o. art center (dac) in Brooklyn, NY.
Roberge has received two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grants and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She was a Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University in 1998-99. Her sculptures are included in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art, Farnsworth Art Museum, Harn Museum of Art, Jackson Laboratories, Bar Harbor, Maine, Runnymede Sculpture Farm, Woodside, California, Emory University in Atlanta, and in private collections in Maine, Boston, New York, Miami, and Santa Barbara.