LJ Roberts

PROOF publication brochure, essay by Jeannine Tang. (Download pdf above)

The art of LJ Roberts often disinters iconic figures, sites and stories of trans and queer history – whether in an installation honoring tr/anscestor Stormé DeLarverie’s life and rebellion, Stormé at Stonewall (2019), or in Roberts’ embroidered portraits of friends, collaborators and lovers that have detailed twenty years of New York City community history. Through a residency and collaboration with Island Press, Roberts produced a double-sided photolithographic silkscreen print The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S. & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era (2025) along with a portfolio of smaller prints; these form part of a new body of work that also includes mixed-media, embroidered textile and sound pieces, to collectively relay half a century of trans, queer, nonbinary and women-owned automotive repair businesses and their cultures.

The double-sided print depicts a map of these queer mechanix, in a contemporary geography timestamped half a century after the legendary Stonewall Rebellion in 1969 when trans and queer people fought back against the police, while anticipating a future in which the United States may be differently described. Roberts’ mapping follows the precedent of Jaune Quick-To-See Smith’s mixed-media State Names (2000), which collages newsprint text of state names to a painted map of the United States, vertical drips of oil paint streaking the work’s surface, blurring borders between states as though dissolving divisions and nominations founded by colonial occupation. If colonization in the Americas imposed the gender binary, contemporary legislation advances this originary violence: between 2020-2025, over a thousand anti-trans bills have been introduced in state and federal legislatures to target women, trans and gender-expansive people’s healthcare, education and ability to publicly appear and move through space. Many must now travel greater distances to fulfil basic needs, with safe mobility all the more critical for sustaining life and culture.

The web of highway routes on Roberts’ map is studded with garages where a contemporary traveler might find repair and respite. Their names are touched by the guardian operators who founded them, ringing with the diction and syntax of queer and feminist DIY cultures. The typeface used across these prints sounds that history aloud – inspired by 1970s writing on the flyers of the St. Louis Women’s Car Repair Collective, whose font was made open-source and downloadable by its designer Nat Pyper, whose work Roberts discovered during archival research. The print’s linework further evokes the typeface’s alphanumeric stylization, the map’s black diagrammatic lines overlaying a lavender illustration of an engine, whose names for mechanical geegaws evoke bodily parts and sexual acts, campily compositing technological systems with corporeal, libidinal ones.

The other side of this (counter) cartographic print collages queer and (trans) feminist automotive history. Employment ads appear with interviews and photographs of autoworkers posed at work with vehicles and tools, all competence and swagger. Anecdotes of trusty mechanics providing emergency services for stray passengers are interspersed with advertising for repairing vintage rides and recent models. We learn of autoshops’ alignment with political organizing, the proximity of garages to lesbian coffee houses, counseling and support services. Images of keys and bolts, nuts and screws punctuate the collage, a visual language of joining that connects the fasteners of mechanical engineering to sexual conjunctions, communal links and social support.

Accompanying the (counter) public visual culture of Roberts’ cartographic print, is a portfolio of six smaller etchings and a poem by Miller Oberman evoking a more personal register. These greyscale etchings reiterate artefacts and photographs from the artist’s life and travels. Here, a mailbox outside a San Diego dry cleaner used for cleaning textiles; there, a picture from the historic queer beach town Provincetown. In one text-based print, the words “horse power” felicitously appears during a cross-country road trip, alluding to engine capacity and mechanical work. Other etchings evoke bodies of travelers and mechanix: two gloves whose fingers touch; two sweatshirts emblazoned “OIL CHANGES” recalls queer object pairs such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ coupling of two clocks that desynchronize over time, in “Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) from 1991. The poet Miller Oberman responds to these highway missives in oil change, a verse formed with line breaks throughout, as though a mixtape and road lyric of travel’s intimate sensorium.

Roberts’ project is suffused with the semiotics of trans and queer DIY automotive cultures, reveling in how trans and queer people have collectively sustained one another and the codes of their communicating for cause – weaving an infrastructure of safety that remains with us still and transports us toward an open future, charted by this artist’s talismanic, protective mapping.

Jeannine Tang, Assistant Professor of Performance Studies, New York University