Aminah Robinson

About The Artist

Any work of art must be created by and for the human spirit— must express it, nourish it, enrich it. This work of art is grounded in the physical world but comes to full bloom in the world of the spirit.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

In 1940, the year Brenda Lynn Robinson was born in Columbus, Ohio, she moved with her family into Poindexter Village, one of the nation’s first federally funded apartment complexes. Throughout her life, Robinson’s memories and research about Poindexter Village and Mt. Vernon Avenue, the lively commercial street nearby, were the focus of much of her work. From the time she was a little girl, Robinson knew she wanted to be an artist and her first studio was under her bed in the room she shared with her older sister Sue and her younger sister Sharron in the Poindexter apartment. Her father taught her how to draw and how to make books from homemade paper and “hogmawg,” a collection of mud, clay, twigs, leaves, lime, animal grease, and glue. Robinson used hogmawg in paintings and sculpture to add dimensionality and a highly expressive quality to her work. Her mother taught her spinning, weaving, needle and button work, which she incorporated in both two- and three-dimensional art. She began attending the Columbus Art School (now the Columbus College of Art and Design) on Saturdays while still in public school and then continued after she graduated from high school. Robinson combined the art traditions handed down to her from her family with the formal training she received in art school to develop an extraordinary, personal artistic vocabulary that included mixed-media sculpture, rag paintings, paintings on cloth, intricate drawings, woodcut prints, buttonbeaded books and dolls, and monumental tapestries she called “RagGonNons.”

Robinson’s wide-ranging subject matter embraced the local history of Black neighborhoods in Columbus, oral history gleaned from her elders, and research she conducted at the main library, where she worked during art school. The stories from her Uncle Alvin and Aunt Cornelia led her to connect her own story with those of ancestors who were kidnapped in Africa, forced to endure the Middle Passage, and enslaved in the American South. She celebrated those who survived and traced the journey of those who left the South and ultimately settled in cities such as Columbus. During the 1960s, Robinson was active in the Civil Rights movement and participated in the March on Washington. “I am Black as well as American—and my art as a whole must reflect that Blackness and all other influences around. In short, Black American Art is a fully American art…I do not ever want to stray from those very roots which gave birth to me…. Where do I go from here as a creative Black artist? To meet the needs of my people through work—that is my calling.” In the face of unmitigated racism and bigotry, she believed that telling the story of the African American past, present, and future in her art served to advance the struggle for equality and freedom. She worked on this massive story for six decades and referred to it as an all-encompassing “Symphonic Poem.” During the 1970s, Columbus woodcarver Elijah Pierce became an influential friend and mentor, who encouraged her to “stay on the path” and continue telling this story despite political upheaval and personal challenges.