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
Hales is pleased to announce LJ Roberts' debut solo exhibition at the gallery, The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S. & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era. The show presentsa cartography of queer auto mechanics as a multi-media project, combining large-scale textile with printmaking and sound.
Roberts' interdisciplinary practice addresses queer and trans politics, nomadism, and kinship structures. In 2024, Roberts was included in the blockbuster show, Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art at the Barbican Art Gallery, London which toured to Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Their work is currently on view in Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture at the Center for Architecture, New York, through 2 September 2025.
The centerpiece of The Queer Mechanix is a large-scale quilted map of queer and trans auto mechanic shops across the United States and Canada that operated from 1969 to 2023. Roberts utilizes an expansive range of textile techniques, including toy knitting machines and hand-stitched embroidery, to create a monumental textile collage. The map charts the name, location, and dates of operation of each of the shops in single-strand embroideries, sewn onto upcycled rubber tire innertubes and blue jean pockets. Zippers mounted on rubber and hand-sewn fabric demarcate the interstate road system that crisscrosses the United States. Assembláged road markers illustrate the roadway connections of these auto mechanic shops and evoke the presence of drivers who traverse the highways.
The work in the exhibition is a timely follow up to Roberts' seminal map, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (2011),which is in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Roberts also presents small-scale hand-stitched single-strand embroideries, including embroidered fantasy vehicles. Two conversion vans, Ever approaching, never arriving (towards a horizon) and They entered through the skylight (then they exited), recall the artist's large-scale quilt,
VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAmDentalDamDamn (2020), and a 1980 Trans-Am, T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem), depicts the Pontiac model made in Detroit during the same year of the artist's birth.
The Queer Mechanix also takes the form of a two-sided print, screen print and photolithography, that presents the map on one side and an archive of images, graphics, and printed matter from these shops on the other. Made in collaboration with Island Press, The Queer Mechanix print is accompanied by a "mixtape" of reconfigured road trip anthems. The exhibition is punctuated with two intimate etchings, simultaneously subtle and explicit, depicting the overlap of queer sexuality and auto mechanic labor.
The project was initially sparked by a 1970s flyer made by the Women's Car Repair Collective in St. Louis, Missouri. The collective used a signature calligraphy, inspired by a Lesbian magazine called Moonstorm, published by Tiamat Press. In 2018, artist Nat Pyper created the "Women's Car Repair Collective" font inspired by the lettering on the collective's ephemera. All the text that appears in The Queer Mechanix is written in the same font. Roberts uses this to traverse time, connecting garages past, present, and future.
The Queer Mechanix continues Roberts' practice of transforming oft erased queer and trans histories and documenting thriving spaces of LGBTQI+ culture. The show is a celebration of community, labor, and economic autonomy and confronts critical issues of historical and present-day struggle. Auto travel has become vital for people seeking abortions, other reproductive health services, and gender-affirming care. These auto mechanic shops become sites where travel, imagination, and fantasy materialize as networks for resilience.
LJ Roberts (b.1980 Royal Oak, Michigan, USA) lives and works in Providence, RI.
Roberts' work is in the collections of National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C, USA; The Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY, USA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C, USA; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NY, USA; The New York Historical Society, NY, USA; Oakland Museum of California, CA, USA; and the Tretter Collection at The University of Minnesota, MN, USA.
Roberts has been the past recipient of a Fountainhead Fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University, and residencies at Pioneer Works, MacDowell, IASPIS (International Artists' Studio Program in Sweden, Stockholm), Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, The Textile Arts Center, and The Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. In 2015, Roberts was one of nine recipients of The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI artists from President Barack Obama and received the 2019 President's Award for Art and Activism from the Women's Caucus for Art. 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. Roberts is a 2025 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.
