The BCMA welcomes LJ Roberts’ "T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem)" to its Collection
By Bowdoin College Museum of Art
Created in 2025, LJ Roberts’s T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem) made its public debut at Hales Gallery in New York City as part of the artist’s solo exhibition, The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S. & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era (September 4 - October 18, 2025). During the show, members of the BCMA’s Collectors Collaborative had a chance to learn more about the work from Roberts (see figure 2). As indicated by the title, the exhibition centered queer history, disrupting its traditional marginalization in the history of the United States. Marking the 1969 Stonewall Uprising as the start of a new era, Roberts similarly honors through their work other communities that have historically been oppressed, often through the blatant disregard on the part of the dominant culture of signifiers of identity on the part of communities treated as “other.” Thus, the very title of Roberts’s recent exhibition both acknowledged that “America” encompasses Canada and other nations and that the contemporary political boundaries of the U.S. and Canada represent an erasure of the sovereignty of Indigenous communities from which unceded territories were seized by colonial powers.
Through their work, and through the vibrant artwork which served as the namesake for the show (see here and here), LJ Roberts charts anew a significant portion of North America. Testifying to the need for safe spaces, particularly in an era of political polarization, the proffered map marks the location of trans, lesbian, queer, and non-binary mechanics welcoming to these communities. In this way, the cartographic project brings visibility to underground social networks. It invokes, for example, the historic importance of the Underground Railroad and The Green Book. The Underground Railroad permitted enslaved individuals before and during the Civil War to make their way to freedom, while The Green Book eased the perils of automobile travel for mid-twentieth century Black motorists grappling with the hazards of Jim Crow.
Within this context, LJ Roberts’s T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem) functions as a self-portrait, casting the artist as a “Trans-Am” automobile. The car references the artist’s love of car culture from an early age, a passion fueled by growing up in the Detroit area. Using embroidery, a technique Roberts learned from their grandmother, they trace the likeness of the “Trans Am,” adding their birth year of 1980 to the automobile. Coded language, including “T4T-Am” gestures toward personal ads seeking queer companionship. The moniker “LOL” may also refer to the implicit humor in the work, suggesting that the artist is “laughing out loud.”
Having participated nearly a decade ago in the BCMA’s 2016 exhibition, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to the Present, curated by Kathleen Campagnolo, Jonathan Walz, and Anne Collins Goodyear, the artwork also represents the extension of an ongoing conversation about representation. As they explain: “I made this piece when I was feeling a bit...cheeky! It's a ‘self-portrait-because-I-say-so,’ TRULY, so it feels fitting to have it land in the same place where that momentous show occurred that … got me thinking out of the box about what representation can look like and feel like.”[i]
If this playful self-depiction has a direct link to the context of Bowdoin College, so too does the titular artwork of their most recent exhibition: The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S. & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era (2023-2025). This large textile work was underway when Roberts served at the halley k harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld Artist in Residence during the 2023-24 academic year. They fondly credit the opportunity to work at Bowdoin, both through a welcoming studio space and through conversation with students, faculty, and staff, with moving the project forward in critical ways.
T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem) thus carries with it special connections to the community that has come to serve as its steward. It promises to open many new paths and interconnections in its new home.
Anne Collins Goodyear
Co-Director
[i] LJ Roberts, Email to Anne Collins Goodyear, September 25, 2025. Roberts is referring to the exhibition, This Is a Portrait If I Say So: Identity in American Art, 1912 to Today, on view from June 25, 2016 - October 23, 2016 at the BCMA. The show was co-curated by Kathleen Campagnolo, Anne Collins Goodyear, and Jonathan Walz. It accompanied by a full illustrated eponymous catalogue co-edited by the exhibition curators and published by Yale University Press and features commentary on the work of LJ Roberts.