No matter how far Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s art took her–a MacArthur “Genius” grant, artist residency in Santiago, Chile–she remained a local artist. Columbus, OH.
That’s where she was born in 1940. That’s where she died in 2015. That’s where she lived and created during the intervening years of a brilliant career that now takes center stage at her hometown art museum, the Columbus Museum of Art, during the exhibition,“Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Robinson’s House and Journals”throughOctober 3.
In addition to Robinson’s art–drawings, prints, paintings, sculptures and her famed, mixed media, RagGonOns–the exhibition includes furnishings she made for her home. Also on display are books from her impressive library, many of which she annotated by hand. Visitors will see collections of buttons, fabrics, canes, beaded dolls and thimbles, art she traded with other artists and photo enlargements of her living spaces and studios.
This material–and great volumes more–was bequeathed by the artist to the Columbus Museum of Art upon her death. She even left her dog to the Museum.
CMA staff have been sorting, cataloguing and preserving the gift–which included more than 150 journals and mountains of personal correspondence, art supplies and found objects acquired throughout her life–ever since. The process continues to this day.
Aminah Robinson’s home studio
For Robinson, no separation between home and studio, between person and artist, existed. During the forty years she lived in the home studio on Sunbury Road in Columbus, she created a vibrant environment which became an extension of herself. It allowed the many directions of her creativity to thrive. As such, nearly every object in her home, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant, provides some sense of the artist.
In preserving Robinson’s estate, the CMA is taking care not only of her stuff, but the home itself.
“Those who had visited Aminah in the house during her lifetime and those of us working there after her passing experienced a sense of awe and sacredness in the space,” exhibition co-curator Carole Genshaft told Forbes.com.
As part of its Aminah Robinson Legacy Project which preserves and presents her artwork, the CMA has established an artists’ residency in her home which began this spring. The Museum believes it may be the only residency in the country for African American artists in the home of an African American artist.
By sharing the personal effects which filled Robinson’s home, “Raggin’ On” provides an intimate glimpse into her life and art making.
“The exhibition is designed to conjure the feeling of entering Aminah’s home studio, sitting on her couch and having a conversation with her about what matters most in her world–love, respect for family, community, ancestral history and elevating consciousness about Black life in America and around the world–amplified through her art and writing,” Deidre Hamlar, the exhibition’s other co-curator, said.
Newly recorded conversations with family and friends, and the reconstruction of Robinson’s Writing Room, bring guests even closer to the artist.
“We hope that visitors experience some of the same sense of awe as those who visited Aminah in her home studio, and that through more than 200 examples of her work, they understand her mission–as she wrote–‘to fill in the blank pages of American history’ by documenting the lives and events of both ordinary and extraordinary African Americans,” Genshaft, who spent nearly 20 years working with Robinson on Museum projects, said.
The Missing Pages of American History
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Studies into the Folk Costume of the Blackberry Patch/Poindexter … [+] Village, early 1800–1957, 1980–86, Paint on cloth, 11 x 7 ¾ in.
Columbus Museum of Art, Estate of the Artist
“My works are the missing pages of American history,” Robinson belived.
An American history just now receiving its due.
She grew up in and around poverty in the Black neighborhoods of Columbus during the latter part of Jim Crow and the early stages of the Civil Rights Era. She participated in 1963’s March on Washington. She researched her ancestors who were taken from Angola and enslaved onSapelo Island, GA.
Just as importantly, she traveled widely around the world–Africa, Europe, the Middle East–seeing for herself how other countries and cultures treated Black people.
It was on a 1979 trip to Egypt where she received the name “Aminah” from a holy man.
A local artist with a world view.
Her travels introduced her to the concept of Sankofa. From the Twi language of southern Ghana, Sankofa translates as “to go back and get.” Studying the past in order to navigate the present and plan for the future as explained in the exhibition’s catalogue, which adds, “Robinson employed this philosophy throughout her art by way of certain preferred iconographical themes—slavery, civil rights, women elders, ancestors, and family of both the near and distant past.”
“For seven decades, Aminah worked tirelessly to depict African American people and events in neighborhoods of Columbus, Ohio that have been overlooked and avoided in the past in an effort to make the invisible visible,” Hamlar said.
Robinson’s celebration of the endurance and triumphs of every day Black life and culture in her home city as well as distant locations possess her artworks with universal implications far beyond her local community.
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, School Days, 2003-2007. White paper sewn with buttons, 18 x 67 in.
Columbus Museum of Art, Gift of Artist.
Raggin’ On is the first major exhibition of the artist’s work since her death. The title references Robinson’s belief that her art and writing never end, and thanks to the work being done at the Columbus Museum of Art to further the extraordinary legacy she established, it never will.
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
