Celeste Roberge

Celeste Roberge was born in 1951 in Biddeford, Maine. She earned a BA in Sociology from the University of Maine in 1975, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1979 on a Bernard Langlais Fellowship, completed a BFA in Sculpture at the Maine College of Art in 1979, and received an MFA in Sculpture from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in Halifax in 1986. The University of Maine awarded her an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters in 2008.

Roberge built a long academic career at the University of Florida, where she became a Research Foundation Professor from 2004 to 2007 and served twenty-two years as head of the sculpture area before retiring as Professor Emerita. She has held fellowships and residencies including a Bunting Fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute (1988 to 1989), an artist residency through SIM in Reykjavik, Iceland (2007), and an Arts/Industry residency at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (2013). She maintains a studio in Portland, Maine, and has continued to exhibit steadily since retiring from teaching, with a shift in recent years toward smaller-scale, ocean-themed works on paper such as seaweed drawings and cyanotypes. As of mid 2026, no obituary, gallery statement, or press notice indicates she has died; she is documented as living.

Critical and curatorial writing on Roberge, primarily from TAI Modern, Elizabeth Moss Galleries, and the Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, centers on her long-running use of stone, steel mesh, and gabion construction to build cairn-like forms that read as both geological and bodily. Institutional texts describe a shift in her later career toward a more ecological register, with the 2014 Ocean Floors exhibition at Crisp-Ellert and the 2017 Drawing with Seaweed show at PhoPa Gallery both framed around seaweed, tide, and coastal material as both subject and medium. No exact, attributable critic quotes from a major outlet could be confirmed in the available research, so none are reproduced here.

No verifiable public auction record for a work by Celeste Roberge was located in this research. Her market presence is best described as institutional rather than auction-driven: her work is held by university and regional museums and by corporate and private collections, and she exhibits through a small set of galleries in Maine, including Moss Galleries in Portland, Littlefield Gallery in Winter Harbor, and Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells, rather than through a single exclusive dealer. A jewelry designer who also uses the surname Roberge, Denise Roberge, has a documented auction result at Heritage Auctions, but that record belongs to a different individual working in a different medium and should not be attributed to this artist.

Because Roberge is a common surname shared by several working artists in different media and countries, any provenance or attribution research should confirm the full name, not just the surname, before relying on a museum listing, gallery record, or sale result. There is no catalogue raisonne for this artist, and no evidence of a public auction market comparable to her museum presence, so collectors should expect to verify individual works through the artist, her CV, or her exhibiting galleries rather than through auction comparables.