LJ Roberts (1980, Royal Oak, Michigan) 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 and re-imaging craft practices. Born and raised just outside of Detroit and immersed in car culture as a child and teenager, the artist has a particular interest in how queer and trans people encounter freedom, fear, possibilities, and perils while traveling on the road and living nomadically. Roberts has been active in HIV/AIDS activism for over 20 years and produced numerous collaborative projects that address the on-going AIDS pandemic. 

Roberts has exhibited work in the United States and internationally at institutions such as the The Renwick Gallery at Smithsonian American Art Museum, 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, USA), Toledo Museum of Art (Ohio, USA), Newport Museum of Art (RI, USA), The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelly Foundation (Chicago, USA), 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 (Newport Beach, CA) and The Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, National Academy of Design, New York Historical Society, FLAG Art Foundation, Fragment Gallery, The 8th Floor, Gordon Robichaux, Leslie-Lohman Museum,  Anthology Film Archive, Museum of Art and Design, and Smack Mellon all in New York City.

Their first solo show in New York City, Carry You With Me: Ten Years of Portraits was exhibited at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY) in fall of 2021 and traveled to Cantor Center for the Arts at Stanford University (Palo Alto, CA). A cloth bound, hard cover book published by Pioneer Works 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, Maine). 

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.

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. 

Currently, the artist’s light box installation, “Stormé at Stonewall,” is featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington DC in the Struggle for Justice Gallery.  

LJ Roberts lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island and is represented by Hales, London and New York.