LJ Roberts
The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S. & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era
About the artist
LJ Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures.
LJ Roberts working in their studio, photo by Jenna Bacom
LJ Roberts served as the Arthur and Sheila Prensky Visiting Artist in the spring of 2023. Island Press collaborated on a complex print project with Roberts that will debut at their spring 2025 solo exhibition at Hales Gallery, NY.
Roberts created two related projects while in residence:
and
Oil Changes
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.
Stormé at Stonewall 2019 Light box installation in fourteen (14) parts 60 x 240 in Courtesy LJ Roberts and Hales, London and New York. Photo by LJ Roberts.
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.
