Esmaa Mohamoud
Roberts Projects is pleased to announce its representation of Esmaa Mohamoud. This announcement follows the gallery’s first solo exhibition with the artist in 2025, What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?
Known for her conceptual practice that incorporates familiar objects and symbols from Black visual culture—including football equipment, peacock chairs, lowriders, butterflies and shea butter—Mohamoud reimagines her source materials by transforming their scale and layering cultural references to recontextualize their conventional meaning. Grounded in extensive research and painstaking production, her work displays not only a mastery of a given material, but also a nuanced understanding of its symbolic power. By investigating Black history through its material culture, Mohamoud bypasses monolithic racial stereotypes to envision a world rich with complexity and diverse experiences.
Through her critique of Black body politics, Mohamoud considers how subjects are made to navigate spaces where they have already been objectified and racialized. In creating work that demystifies these unspoken social codes, Mohamoud simultaneously celebrates and reconfigures a visual language rooted in time-honored traditions of resistance and resilience.
About the Artist
Esmaa Mohamoud (b. 1992 London, ON, Canada; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a conceptual artist working at the intersection of sculpture and installation. Her sculptures explore the politics of race and identity through references to and recontextualizing of objects from popular culture. Making use of materials that carry both personal and historical significance, Mohamoud creates symbolically rich and metaphorically complex works that consider the legacy of racial violence and the possibilities for future renewal.
Solo exhibitions include What Does Webster’s Say About Soul?, Roberts Projects, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Complex Dreams, MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2024); Let Them Consume Me In The Light, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL (2023); It Cannot Always Be Night, Arsenal New York, NY (2022) and Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, Museum London, Ontario, Canada, traveled to Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ottawa Art Gallery, Winnipeg Art Gallery and Art Gallery of Alberta, Canada. Group exhibitions include Sports Culture, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2024), traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR and Perez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Resistance Training, MSU Broad Art Museum (2023) and In These Truths, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY (2022).
Recent museum acquisitions of Mohamoud’s work include the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY and The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, AL. Her work is featured in numerous public collections including the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; MSU Broad Art Museum; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Quebec, Canada; Museum London, Ontario; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC and the Winnipeg Art Gallery, Manitoba, Canada, among others.