"The West End Avenue Collection" was anonymously donated to the Leslie-Lohman Museum in 2013. The collection encompasses multiple decades of photocopied collages. Like paper dolls, West End’s figures were arranged on the glass plate of the photocopy machine and reproduced—no adhesive was ever used in the work’s construction, allowing the pieces to be moved around in never-ending compositions.
Over several months, Kate Huh spent time with the "West End Avenue Collection" in the Leslie-L...
"The West End Avenue Collection" was anonymously donated to the Leslie-Lohman Museum in 2013. The collection encompasses multiple decades of photocopied collages. Like paper dolls, West End’s figures were arranged on the glass plate of the photocopy machine and reproduced—no adhesive was ever used in the work’s construction, allowing the pieces to be moved around in never-ending compositions.
Over several months, Kate Huh spent time with the "West End Avenue Collection" in the Leslie-Lohman Museum’s archives. Huh used photocopied images of pieces from the West End Avenue Collection to create two new collages. For Huh this process marks a vital collaboration between herself and the anonymous producer of the West End Collection. This collaboration extends to LJ Roberts, who takes Huh’s collages and painstakingly translates them into detailed embroidered textiles.
Kate Huh is a NYC based artist/activist. She has exhibited her visual art, installations and films throughout the United States and Europe since 1982. Her work appears in the following books; "Time Capsule, a Concise Encyclopedia of Women Artists" Creative Time 1995, "Caught in the Act, Photographs by Dona Ann McAdams" Aperture Foundation 1996, “Dangerous Families: Queer Writing on Surviving” Routledge 2004, "Queer Zines" Printed Matter 2008, "Cruising the Archive" ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archive 2011, ”Herstory Inventory" Dancing Fox Press 2014 and “Cock, Paper, Scissors” ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the USC Libraries 2016.
LJ Roberts is a visual artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. Their work investigates overlaps of queer and trans politics, activism, protest and craft through an intersectional feminist lens. LJ’s work has been shown at such venues as The Victoria and Albert Museum, Yerba Buena Center of the Arts, The Orange County Museum of Art, The Bag Factory, The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art. LJ is currently working on an artist book project that combines archives, and narrative(s) regarding the Stonewall Riots, a screen printing project that addresses neuro-divergence through abstraction and deconstructed textiles, a large project on the Van Dykes, a lesbian separatist gang that traversed the continent in conversions vans in the 1970s, and an embroidered portrait project that has been on-going since 2012.
Join the Leslie-Lohman Museum for an evening of discussion with Kate Huh and LJ Roberts about their ongoing collaboration. Tickets are free, seating is limited. Please register for the event by following the ticket link.
Image: Kate Huh and LJ Roberts
"The West End Archive Never-ending, Scroll #1", 2015-2016
Embroidered panels. Courtesy the artists
