The Queer Mechanix of the Lands Currently Referred to as the U.S & Canada Before & During the 54th Year of the Stonewall Era documents women’s, trans, and non-binary auto repair shops from 1969 to 2023.

The centerpiece of The Queer Mechanix project is a large-scale quilted map of queer and trans auto mechanic shops across the United States and Canada that operated from 1969 to 2023. Roberts utilizes an expansive range of textile techniques, including toy knitting machines and hand-stitched embroidery, to create a monumental textile collage. The map ration of each of the shops in single-strand embroideries, sewn onto upcycled rubber tire innertubes and blue jean pockets. Zippers mounted on rubber and hand-sewn fabric demarcate the interstate road system that crisscrosses the United States. Assembláged road markers illustrate the roadway connections of these auto mechanic shops and evoke the presence of drivers who traverse the highways.

The Queer Mechanix also takes the form of a two-sided print, screen print and photolithography, that presents the map on one side and an archive of images, graphics, and printed matter from these shops on the other. Made in collaboration with Island Press, The Queer Mechanix print is accompanied by a “mixtape” of reconfigured road trip anthems.

The project was initially sparked by a 1970s flyer made by the Women’s Car Repair Collective in St. Louis, Missouri. The collective used a signature calligraphy, inspired by a Lesbian magazine called Moonstorm, published by Tiamat Press. In 2018, artist Nat Pyper created the “Women’s Car Repair Collective” font inspired by the lettering on the collective’s ephemera. All of the text that appears in The Queer Mechanix project is written in “Women’s Car Repair Collective” font. Roberts uses this lettering to traverse time, connecting garages past, present, and future.

The Queer Mechanix project is affirming of collectivity, labor, and economic autonomy and confronts critical issues of historical and present-day struggle. Auto travel has become vital for people seeking abortions, other reproductive health services, and gender-affirming care. These auto mechanic shops become sites where travel, imagination, and fantasy materialize as networks for resilience.

Also presented in the exhibition were small-scale hand-stitched single-strand embroideries, including embroidered fantasy vehicles. Two conversion vans, Ever approaching, never arriving (towards a horizon) and They entered through the skylight (then they exited), recall the artist’s large-scale quilt, VanDykesTransDykesTransVanTransGrandmxDykesTransAmDentalDamDamn (2020), and a 1980 Trans-Am, T4T-AM (Motor City Mayhem), depicts the Pontiac model made in Detroit during the same year of the artist’s birth. A intricately stitched and re-imagined Delorean Time Machine questions the idea that time is linear, particularly when one considers “queer time,” in which some people encounter the trajectory of life rather than typical time lines shaped by hetero-normative and western models. This Delorean model was also fabricated the same year that the AIDS Crisis was first acknowledged in the media. The AIDS epidemic, still-ongoing reconfigures the present, past, and future, still permeating queer life through memory, current lived experience, and future lives.

The exhibition was punctuated with two intimate etchings, simultaneously subtle and explicit, depicting the overlap of queer sexuality and auto mechanic labor.