Date: Wednesday, April 17, 2024
Time: 7:30 pm
Location: Kresge Auditorium

 

"Material Deviance"

 

LJ Roberts, the 2023–2024 halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence, will present an artist talk on their studio practice trajectory, beginning with a high school visit to the Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. Their work developed through a merging of poetics and textiles during college, and afterward to large-scale collaged quilts and intricate embroideries that illuminate queer and trans (in)visibility and imagination, kinship networks, and expansive cartography. An exploration of recent work incorporating queer archives and nomadic photography via light boxes will wrap up this presentation on an artist merging mediums and taking risks.

Roberts is an artist and writer who creates large-scale textile installations, intricate embroideries, artist books, collages, and mixed-media sculptures. Their work illuminates often erased or unacknowledged queer and trans narratives, people, and places. Roberts has exhibited work at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, National Academy of Design, FLAG Art Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, and Toledo Museum of Art and received, among other awards, The White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQI+ artists. Their work is currently on view at the Barbican Centre in London in Unravel: The Power and Politics of Textiles in Art, and this summer, their light box installation “Stormé at Stonewall” will be featured at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC.

For more information, contact Jenn Berube at jberube@bowdoin.edu or 207-725-3928.

Open to the public free of charge.

To view a live-stream of this talk, please visit the Bowdoin Talks webpage.

 

Sponsored by the halley k harrisburg and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence program.