Lacey Jane Roberts

The Queer Houses of Brooklyn In The Three Towns of Breukelen, Boswyck, and Midwout During the 41st Year of the Stonewall Era, June 2011

Based on the drawing by Daniel Rosza Lang/Levitsky, and with illustrations by Buzz Slutzky, the knitted, quilted and stitched map of these queer collective houses, each with their own 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 Riots, activist movements such as ACT UP! and Queer Nation, the potent imagery of the artist collective Gran Fury, and the collective grief and perseverance of the AIDS Quilt, which included thousands of participants from across the world.  In a way that is meant to evoke both the formal and radical, this work celebrates the existence of chosen and deliberate  queer families built on a fierce spirit of love, sex, collective liberation, and gender, 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.