LJ Roberts awarded Colene Brown Art Prize 2022

Hales is delighted to announce that LJ Roberts is a recipient of the Colene Brown Art Prize. This prize awards ten New York-based visual artists with $10,000 unrestricted grants. The Prize is underwritten by artist and former BRIC Board Member Deborah Brown and her sister Ellen Brown in memory of their late mother, Colene Brown, and is funded through the Harold and Colene Brown Family Foundation.

 

As a trans, nonbinary artist, L.J. Roberts has built a body of work centered around queer experiences and the vibrance and resilience of LGBTQIA+ individuals, kinship, and history. They collage queer history and portraits through large quilted textile installations, while Roberts' ongoing hand-stitched embroidery project, Ten Years of Portraits, features friends and loved ones in everyday life and spaces. Other works include protest banners, imagery from feminist and trans histories, and embroidered cursive text. They also extend textiles into installation art, like a life-size chain link fence composed almost entirely of yarn and woven wire, and create works on paper, especially collages with a similar aesthetic to their quilting style. Roberts' fiber art practice is a labor of love-its materiality echoes the intimate and long history; experiences; and transformative power, creativity, and boundlessness of queer individuals.

 

 

 LJ Roberts

Colene Brown Art Prize