Roberta Flack Estate Jewelry and Style Archive Heads to Auction

Roberta Flack's jewelry is about to do what her music did for decades: hold a life in the palm of your hand. Julien’s will send more than 500 lots from her personal archive to auction, and the sale’s most revealing pieces show Flack not as a star chasing spectacle, but as a woman who understood how clothing, jewels, and keepsakes could preserve identity.

The sale, titled Roberta Flack: Style, Art & Music | No Reserve, opens bidding online now, with the live auction set for May 14, 2026, at Julien’s Auctions in Gardena, California. The roster goes well beyond jewelry, drawing from Flack’s private world with Oscar de la Renta gowns, stage-worn ensembles, original artwork, gold records, and personal mementos. Yet the jewelry carries a particular emotional charge, because it sits closest to the body and often says the most with the least.

The standout lot is a Bulgari collar necklace in 18-karat yellow gold, set with cultured pearl, diamond, pink tourmaline, and peridot. The semi-rigid design, 15 1/2 inches long, uses triangular peridot and pink tourmaline links around a central diamond-and-pearl zigzag motif. It is the kind of piece Bulgari made famous in the late 20th century, when the house leaned into sculptural gold and color-rich stones rather than dainty ornament. Here, the combination of pearl, tourmaline, and peridot gives the necklace a polished but personal character, glamorous without feeling overheated.

That balance fits Flack’s public image. She died on February 24, 2025, at 88, after announcing an ALS diagnosis in 2022, and she left behind one of American music’s most durable résumés: five Grammy wins, 14 nominations, and the distinction of being the first artist to win Record of the Year in back-to-back years, for The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face and Killing Me Softly with His Song. Howard University, where Flack earned a Bachelor of Music Education in 1958 and later received an honorary Doctor of Music, has called her an extraordinary alumna whose influence stretched far beyond the stage.

The auction’s most meaningful note may be its destination. Flack founded The Roberta Flack Foundation in 2010 to support children, especially girls of color, through education and music, and to support animal welfare. With proceeds directed to that work, the sale turns estate jewelry into something more than memorabilia: it becomes a continuation of Flack’s own priorities, where beauty, authorship, and care all belonged to the same life.