The Sleepwalkers presents two young figures rendered through Deborah Roberts's signature collage language, where cut fragments of found imagery, painted passages, and layered paper surfaces converge into something far more charged than portraiture. Created in 2017, the mixed media work on paper measures 111.8 by 81.3 centimeters and carries the visual tension Roberts has built her practice around, placing Black children in compositions that simultaneously celebrate and interrogate how innocence is perceived, protected, or denied. The figures occupy an ambiguous threshold, neither fully present nor fully absent, which gives the title its psychological weight and invites sustained looking. Roberts works within a broader conversation about representation, vulnerability, and the cultural narratives imposed on young Black bodies, drawing from advertising imagery, vintage photography, and art historical sources to construct faces and forms that feel both familiar and deliberately fractured. The collage technique is not merely formal play. It functions as a critical strategy, disrupting the seamlessness of idealized imagery and foregrounding the constructed nature of identity itself. The 2017 date situates the work in a particularly fertile period of Roberts's career, when her collages were gaining significant institutional attention and her thematic concerns were sharpening into the focused, politically resonant body of work now held in major collections. Signed by the artist and offered without frame, this piece is accompanied by photography credit to Philip Rogers and is currently presented through The Studio Museum in Harlem, an institution with deep ties to Roberts's practice and to the broader legacy of African American art. Works on paper from this period represent an important entry point into Roberts's output, combining intimacy of scale with the full conceptual force that has defined her reputation.