2025

LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates oft-erased and unacknowledged queer and trans narratives, people, and places. The artist creates conceptual and geographical maps of queer life of the past, present, and future through material deviance and re-imaging craft practices.

Roberts has exhibited work at The Renwick Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Stedelijk Museum, Barbican Centre, Victoria and Albert Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Toledo Museum of Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Orange County Museum of Art, Anchorage Museum of Art, Museum of the City of New York, Brooklyn Museum, National Academy of Design, FLAG Art Foundation, The 8th Floor, and New York Historical.

Roberts received The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI+ artists in 2015 and the Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art and Activism in 2019. Roberts also received BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize in 2022.

Roberts’ work is included in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the National Portrait Gallery, The Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art all at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC.

Roberts lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island and is represented by Hales London and New York.