Zuri presents a young girl caught in the tender, precarious moment of self-formation, rendered in ceramic with the layered visual logic that has defined Deborah Roberts's celebrated collage practice. Marking a significant evolution in the artist's output, this 2025 work represents Roberts's first foray into three-dimensional sculpture, translating her signature fragmented, composite imagery into volumetric form. The result is a figure simultaneously heroic and exposed, exuding quiet defiance while carrying the unmistakable weight of a world that consistently underestimates her. Coded symbols are woven throughout the surface, operating as visual shorthand for the systemic pressures, racial inequities, and narrow beauty standards imposed upon Black girls before they have fully learned their own names. The title, Zuri, a name of Swahili origin meaning beautiful, anchors the work firmly in questions of girlhood, identity, and the contested terrain of who gets to define worth and loveliness. Roberts has spoken at length about the specific developmental window her subjects inhabit, that critical juncture when a girl's sense of self is still forming and most vulnerable to the distortions fed by mainstream visual culture. The ceramic medium adds a further layer of resonance, evoking both the fragility and the permanence that characterize this stage of life. A fired object is transformed and fixed, just as cultural messaging can harden around a young person's sense of possibility before she has had the chance to resist it. For collectors, Zuri offers a rare opportunity to acquire a foundational work from a body of sculpture that extends one of contemporary art's most compelling and socially urgent practices into new material territory. Roberts, whose work is held in major institutional collections across the United States, brings to this piece the same rigorous conceptual framework and emotional acuity that has made her collages so broadly recognized. Measuring 40.6 by 30.5 by 27.9 centimetres and signed by the artist, this work is presented through Stephen Friedman Gallery and represents a pivotal chapter in Roberts's ongoing reckoning with power, image, and the futures owed to young Black women.