Research + Practice: 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 histories, narratives, people, and places. Roberts creates conceptual and geographical maps and amplifies non-linear stories of queer culture and kinships that traverse the past, present, and future through material deviance, poetics, and re-imaging craft practices.

The artist’s work is in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, New York Historical Society, Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, Oakland Museum of California, and the National Portrait Gallery, The Renwick Gallery, and the Archives of American Art, all at the Smithsonian.

LJ's 2025 commission "In the Fantasy I am Already There," at the Center for Architecture in New York was part of the exhibition "Fantasizing Design: Phyllis Birkby Builds Lesbian Feminist Architecture." A solo show of new work that maps and archives queer and trans auto mechanic services across Canada and the U.S. was presented at Hales New York earlier this fall.

This talk is a part of the Studio Arts and Design Research + Practice lecture and conversation series, occurring on Wednesday nights. The Research + Practice series invites acclaimed artists, writers, critics and scholars to the Corcoran School throughout the year. The talks are free to the public, providing both the community and our students access to thought-provoking examples of contemporary research and practice and a chance to engage with leading cultural figures. Speakers are nominated and selected by the Studio Arts and Design programs, hosted by students and faculty at the historic Beaux Arts Flagg Building in Washington, D.C. Dates for the Research + Practice series are listed below.

We look forward to seeing you soon!

* All events will be Wednesday nights, 6:30pm-8:00pm in Hammer Auditorium.*

9/24/2025: Nekisha Durrett

10/01/2025: Arsh Raziuddin

10/22/2025: Joey Enríquez

11/05/2025: LJ Roberts

11/12/2025: Nursena Caksen

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