Join artist LJ Roberts, featured in MAD's current exhibition Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field, for an afternoon seminar that explores how design decisions like layout, font size, and negative space interact with poetic texts when printed in artist zines.

How, and where, the printed word appears on the page affects a reader’s experience of any text. Having recently published their first artist’s book (bricks and stone, 2017), Roberts will explain the design decisions they made when creating the publication before leading participants in laying out and collaging poetry in pre-made mini-zine booklets. During the hands-on portion of the event, Roberts will also discuss the zine Vanifesto: A Meditation on Van Lust, by Hadassah D’Luxe, which serves as inspiration for the work they are currently making in Studio Views.

Participants are encouraged to bring copies of existing poetry (their own or others’) for use during this event. All other materials will be provided.

About the Artist

LJ Roberts approaches working in textiles with political urgency. They are interested in materialities that mark political histories and enable future speculations. The promises and problematics of queer and alternative kinship structures, nomadism, landlessness, and concepts of time inform their current explorations. 

Roberts’ work has been shown at venues including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Orange County Museum of Art, the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, the Powerhouse Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the DePaul Art Museum, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, where their work is in the permanent collection. Roberts is a past recipient of the White House Champions of Change Award for LGBTQ artists, a MacDowell Colony fellowship, the Fountainhead Fellowship, and residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, ACRE, and the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. Roberts was an artist-in-residence at the Museum of Arts and Design in 2009.