L.J. Roberts, The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout during the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era (based on a 2010 drawing by Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky with 24 illustrations by Buzz Slutzky on printed pin-back buttons), 2011, poly-fill, acrylic, rayon, Lurex, wool, polyester, cotton, lamé, sequins, and blended fabrics with printed pin-back buttons, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Elaine Reuben, 2012.43, © 2011, L.J. Roberts

The Queer Houses of Brooklyn in the Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, is documentation of a contemporary moment of a thriving, activist, and creative community that practices resilience and resistance through collaboration and cooperative co-existence, kinship, and love. Based on the drawing by Rosza Daniel Lang/Levitsky and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky, the knitted, quilted and stitched map of these queer collective houses, each with their characteristic name and symbol, references and subverts the iconography of coats-of-arms and heraldic devices usually associated with royalty, corporations, and the state.

The work honors queer, feminist and trans histories such as the Stonewall Uprising, activist movements such as ACT-UP and the collective grief and perseverance of the AIDS Quilt, which included thousands of participants from around the world. In a way that is meant to evoke both the formal and the radical, this work celebrates the existence of chosen and deliberate queer families built on a fierce spirit of love, sex, collective liberation, and gender, sexual, and self-determination. Additionally, the map is a living and active archival memento of radical Do-It-Yourself/Do-It-Together/punk craft practice and spirit that includes one-inch pins printed with the name of each house and its representative illustration, free for any viewer to take.