LJ Roberts

LJ Roberts (b.1980 Royal Oak, Michigan, USA) creates large-scale textile installations, embroideries, artist books, and collages. Their work investigates overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest, and craft. Roberts lives and works in Providence, RI. 

 

Roberts has exhibited work in the United States and internationally at institutions such as the The Renwick Gallery, Archives of American Art and the National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC: Barbican Centre, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, CT; Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; Newport Museum of Art, RI; The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation, Chicago; The Powerhouse Museum, Australia; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco; The ONE Lesbian and Gay Archives, Los Angeles; Orange County Museum of Art, CA; Anchorage Museum, AK; and The Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, National Academy of Design, New York Historical Society, FLAG Art Foundation, Center for Architecture, Fragment Gallery, The 8th Floor, Gordon Robichaux, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art,  Anthology Film Archive, Museum of Art and Design, and Smack Mellon all in New York City.

 

The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, NY; New York Historical Society, NY; Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, CA; Leslie-Lohman Museum, NY; Oakland Museum of California; and the National Portrait Gallery, The Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art, all at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC. Their light box installation, “Stormé at Stonewall,” is featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC in the Struggle for Justice Gallery.  

 

Their first solo show in New York City, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits was exhibited at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY in 2021 and traveled to Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, Palo Alto, CA (2022). A major publication was made in conjunction with the show, and includes writing by Sur Rodney (Sur), Carmen Hermo, Tirza True Latimer, TT Takemoto, and Theodore Kerr. 

 

Roberts has been a past artist-in-residence at IASPIS, Stockholm; Ox-Bow School of Art, Queenslab, Textile Arts Center, Pioneer Works, ACRE, The Bag Factory, and MacDowell. Most recently they were the 2023 Arthur and Sheila Prensky Artist-in-Residence at Island Press at Washington University in St. Louis and the 2023-2024 halley k. harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence at Bowdoin College, Brunswick, ME.

 

Roberts has been the past recipient of an Ora Mary Pelham Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, a Murphy Cadogan Award from the San Francisco Foundation, a Fountainhead Fellowship from Virginia Commonweath Univeristy, 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. They were a 2021 Socrates Sculpture Park Artist Fellow and received BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize in 2022.  Roberts is a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.