Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Knowing Love from Where She Sits

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

Gift of Love, 1974-2002

Wood, hogmawg (mud, pig grease, dyes, glue, and lime), mud, leather, music boxes, and found objects, 

61 x 35 x 56 inches

Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio: Promised gift of the artist

© Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

The Columbus Museum of Art's Street Talk and Spiritual Matters: Aminah's Mt. Vernon Avenue will close on September 4. Anyone within a day's drive of central Ohio can still hurry to see Robinson's peerless work. For those of you who can't make it, look up Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, a CMA catalogue with essays, published by Harry N. Abrams on the occasion of the Robinson retrospective in 2002. The CMA also maintains an encyclopedic website, Aminah's World. 

Robinson is a single-minded artist who has been making art from before sunrise until the wee hours for most of her life. The vastness of her oeuvre (which includes sculptures, constructions, quilted fabric "paintings," books, prints, drawings, and carvings) reflects her fertility of imagination and strength of mission, both fed by finely educated observational and analytical skills. As stunning as her purely generative force is her ability to express herself by inventing unique, emotionally charged forms.

The Gift of Love chair is signed and dated 1995, but the museum dates it 1974-2002. Since the chair returns to Robinson's home and studio when it is not on loan, it’s possible that it will be dated even further out the next time it’s shown. 

One of the preoccupations driving Robinson is keeping alive the memory of the Columbus, Ohio African-American neighborhood where she grew up. During her childhood in the 1950's, she heard stories sacred to generations of her elders—stories going as far back as her eldest aunt's recollections of the Middle Passage from Angola to slavery in Georgia and eventual emancipation. All of Robinson's work is Janus-like, deeply engaged with the past, with an urgent push into a future informed by history. Robinson is passionate about the education of every new generation, and has made many books for children to that end. 

Robinson's present—in which she never ceases to work—is composed almost entirely of past and future. Since neither ever ends, it is not merely poetic to say that none of her works is ever necessarily finished. That's how I understand the Gift of Love chair. However it be signed or labeled, like her life and oeuvre, it’s a work alive with potential. Even though I write of it as a work of art occupying museum space (aren't museum artifacts "closed?"), it’s uniquely open, and alive.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

Gift of Love, 1974-2002

© Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson

This detail is cropped from full view, above.

Gift of Love, according to Museum labeling, is made of "wood, hagmawg, mud, leather, music boxes, found objects." To pursue the "found objects" a little further, my survey discovers sticks and twigs; massive tree roots; steel wool pads; artist's work boxes; buttons; cowrie shells; stamped impressions taken from screens and miscellaneous objects; a tin can cut into thin strips shaped into a curlicue table; fabric scraps, and the wooden handles of hand tools and kitchen implements. This is certain to be a partial list.

Author photo, left. Note cut tin can chair atop 

button-covered work box.

What's "hogmawg?" It's a material her resourceful father taught Robinson to make in her childhood, when money was scarce. It's compounded of fat, mud, glue, lime, dye, and probably contains other natural elements. Make no mistake: Robinson is a major American artist who commands very high prices; she’s academically trained, a lover of Michelangelo, and a 2006 MacArthur Foundation “Genius" Grant winner. She can afford and knows how to use any material or implement she wants, but hogmawg remains a commonly-used material in her work.

Robinson is an artist of figure and text. Still life or landscape exists in her work only to the extent that the spirit blows through objects and landscapes bustle with people. In her Memory Maps series of mixed media RagGonNons (they require their own nomenclature, being neither paintings, quilts, nor banners, but related to each) she maps her old neighborhood, long since decayed, accurately labeling street addresses, businesses, buildings, and even the vendors and local characters themselves. It doesn’t take an interest in the history of Columbus, however, for the viewer to be moved by the teeming street life represented in joyous fashion. Along Mt. Vernon Avenue, everyone is familiar, connected by proximity, daily transactions, and shared past (see below).

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 

Mt. Vernon Avenue, North Side of Street 1900-1957/Page Three: Memory Maps, (detail) 1989-92 

RagGonNon: paint on cloth with thread and buttons, 40 x 224 inches,

Collection of the artist. 

Author photos of Hampton Court, above,
and Gift of Love  right

Robinson’s imposing chair is a figurative object, yet of a single, solitary sort. The grandeur of its scale transcends its humble materials, setting its occupant apart as a throne would. Pictured left is a 17^th-century throne in a reception room at Hampton Court, near London. The chair itself is austere, but placed in its grand setting. Robinson’s chair, by contrast, provides its own rich ornamentation and its own environment. No ermine is required of its occupant to make an impression on the visitor. 

Yet on the left side of Gift of Love, carved into a large, wooden watercolor box attached to the frame, are the words, “EVERY DAY LIFE AND HISTORY OF AFRO AMERIKANS FEATURING COLUMBUS OHIO.” (Below.) Down the red staff on the right, below Robinson’s signature, is the further attribution to the series, “Legends of the Blackberry Patch.” The artist explicitly considers it part of her community series. This confuses the impulse to think it indicates of hierarchical prominence. Who would stand out in the Blackberry Patch? The Ice Man and Soothsayer have their own pulpits.

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The occupant of this chair is surrounded by a world of figures assembled from mud, sticks and scraps. Where we’ve seen the masses of people on the Mt. Vernon Avenue sidewalks, above, the masses are missing from the chair, leaving individuated, outstanding characters set apart from the throng. 

Along the back of the chair, for instance, Robinson has placed an image of Oba. As a grant recipient, the artist once traveled in several African countries, including Nigeria, the home of the Yoruba. The “oba” is a village leader among the Yoruba, so he stands for the idea of a father-like, wise and nurturing protector.

The next image to the right is of the barber-carver, Elijah Pierce, a brilliant folk artist from Columbus who was a crucial mentor for the young Robinson. (Pierce was a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellow. Other figures mounted around the chair depict her mother demonstrating needlecrafts to children; her father and others instructing youth and telling stories. One figure strides forward with his head turned backwards, her late son, illustrating Robinson’s  linking of past and future in the fleeting present.

While Gift of Love surrounds the sitter with figures that represent Robinson’s legacy of community and its paragons of creativity, the chair has a soul deeper even than representation for being filled with latent music. The Museum’s label notes that music boxes are among Robinson’s materials, even though they are easily overlooked in the many other fascinations of the chair.

  

Music is a major motif throughout Robinson’s work. My Lord What a Morning—organ pipes with drawing—and sketches for it, pictured below, suggest the force she finds in the songs that have sustained Afro-Americans ever since African slaves were brought to this continent. She has plainly and powerfully drawn many emotionally loaded images of women—mostly their faces and enormous hands—based on the titles of spirituals.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, My Lord What a Morning, 1994

Acrylic on wood with iron, steel and music boxes, 10 pieces, 8-10 ft height

Museum Purchase, Derby Fund

Once I started concentrating, it didn't take long to find six music boxes imbedded in Gift of Love, I'm certain that there are more. Their keys protrude from the backs of figures like Pierce (below), the sewing mother, Oba, the backwards-walking youth, the may playing the "button accordion" (right), etc. Even without hearing a note, know that these figures can sing makes them even more real and alive. Like all of us, they are composed of earth and they have breath because they can sing. Be we are not just alike: Those folks are immortal because art will keep them that way forever.

Gift of Love is the heart of Robinson's work for several reasons. One of them is because it is the most complete and refined statement of her theme of loving connectedness. She illustrates it in the tenderly posed family carved into the leather seat. She illustrates it specifically in portraits of revered elders. She indicates its spiritual dimension by incorporating music into the very construction of the piece. Her process and materials emphasize the deliberate, hand-crafted, human-scaled reality of love.

Yet the chair is singular for all its being an exemplar of central themes. For one thing, it really is a throne, even in relation to the common world of the Blackberry Patch. The tendency is to think of Robinson as a populist artist, but this piece proves that she allows exceptions. This work is in her private collection and she’s worked on it for years. It’s her chair. She’s the one it’s made for, the artist is the person apart.

Another common (and accurate) observation about the generality of Robinson’s work is that it is colorful and bright. Indeed she paints with huge, undiluted and unmixed strokes of strokes of color; she collages with scraps of bold, eye-catching prints or men’s ties; buttons decorate work in every medium she plies. There can be an almost circus-like quality to the Columbus, Ohio work, giving her the reputation of an artist who makes sweet and accessible, warm-hearted, nostalgic work. Even the Macarthur Foundation cited her for her body of work as a “folk artist” (she emphatically is not), with the unfortunate suggestion of Grandma Moses or toothless sweetness.

Gift of Love is highly colored, within a broad palette of varnished black and brown. It is a hymn to every shade of dark, and is populated by figures representing all the shapes and colors of (steel-wooly haired) Black people. Where many viewers just overlook skin tone in the swirling carnival of colors in her work on paper, that can't be done here. Smack in the center is the universal image of a nurturing nuclear family, portrayed as black as night. 

This detail is cropped from full view at top. NB black roots 

crossing at the middle of the seat.

The found materials selected for this work aren’t all buttons and bottle-tops. Two massive tree roots that support the seat and weave through its arms hold the chair together. The job even of placing them would have been formidable for this solitary artist with a very cramped workspace.  The chair was hand-made and shows every mark of Robinson’s hewing and carving. It is plain that it was made without assistance from power tools. All the wood is surely darkened and shiny with gallons of Robinson’s of sweat. The act of making the chair reflects the artist's connectedness to the history she inhabits and celebrates, the traditions of manual labor and rough work.

Robinson may never repose on the throne, but, like any person’s favorite chair—the one that eventually conforms to one’s own shape—Gift of Love is her “Self-portrait as an Artist.” It is her family tree (her “roots”) and her mission of memory. But it is also a mirror that reflects her person and character: indomitable, reverent, skillful, witty, tough, and Black. She knows who she is and she sees herself set apart on the throne she’s earned and built for herself.

The throne represents the artist’s authority as observer and interpreter.  Every detail emphasizes the care she took to let us know that it’s African-Americans she’s observing.

Robinson’s work is considered a humanistic treasure trove that exemplifies beauty, intelligence, heart, and inspiration without ever demonstrating sentimentality, moralizing, or grandiosity. Many white viewers appreciate that their pleasure isn't complicated by any explicit race message—meaning that the work doesn’t seem political, angry, or disturbing to people who don’t want Blacks and Whites to be different. They might even use Robinson’s work to prove that the races are peacefully and contentedly just alike.

Gift of Love, however, is uncompromisingly situated as an Afro-American work. It has an unmistakable point of view as a self-portrait by an Afro-American artist. It touches on the major themes that everyone can love, but it reminds us that all of her work is the product of vision arising from singularly African-American experience. It is inherently not like the experience of white people.

As viewers of art, we are never obliged to worry about an artist’s intentions. We may understand any object, text, or piece of music on its aesthetic merits and in the context that we place it in. This is hardly a barren approach; it can be the source of considerable insight and pleasure.

But to the extent that we value art as experience that expands and generously complicates the world; and to the extent that we believe that artists are worthy of thrones with some height and decoration, it behooves us to wonder what they mean when they reveal their work to us. To consider the racial content of Robinson’s work only expands the notion of her work’s’ relevance and beauty. It’s to respect her perspective and to acknowledge that we stand to learn from artists.

If all we can do is to worry that we'll find something scary if we acknowledge Robinson's legitimate concern with race, then we need all the more to study and understand her work. We need  to take a lesson in her understanding of love, and to give up thinking of her work as an adored pet to whom we never give a thought, presuming on its good nature. 


If we know Robinson's Gift of Love chair, we'll know a lot more about a point of view that gives love of family, community, and place deeper colors and even more weight of significance than we might otherwise realize.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Gift of Love, Author photo

The Drawings of Bruce New: We Don't Know What Love Is

This image is a recent drawing from Bruce New's large body of work on paper. Call it a drawing with collage elements or vice versa; New doesn't care about nomenclature. Note the pages of old books, browned with age, used as surface; the cut-out texts that lend gray tones to figures, and the pedestal, meticulously assembled (as they always are in his work) of lines from antique history or art books. New considers himself to be "sort of limited in drawing ability," so the severe geometry of his drawings results from the use of drafting tools, manual aids for someone who, presumably, "can't even draw a straight line."  

See a large selection of New's current, related work at http://brucenew.tumblr.com/archive .

Outsider in the 21st Century Hollow

When an artist refers me to his website and then tells me outright that he is an "outsider/folk/visionary artist," I'm disconcerted. Skeptical. New's biography, on the one hand, fulfills classic expectations of the folk or naive artist. He's 41 years old and lives with his wife, Robin, in a hollow near Burnside, Kentucky. He dropped out of school at 18 to take a job with a construction crew, moving to Houston to renovate hotels while his buddies went to college. When I recently spoke with New on the telephone, I had to quash my urge to wince every time his good manners required him to call me "Ma'am."

New worked by himself with paper and ink for fifteen years before he considered art his vocation: "One day I looked at what I was doing and realized that this is me," he told Duff Lindsay in 2010, when Lindsay introduced New to the public at his respected folk and outsider gallery in Columbus, Ohio  (http://www.lindsaygallery.com/).

Still, there's almost as much about New that contradicts any traditional ("obsolete," Lindsay argues) idea of the outsider. He may lack a high school diploma, but he has been an ardent book collector since early childhood. His house is packed with books, many of them rare. "I have a great library," he assents. It's not only for chopping up; he reads it.

As for being naive, he's the first to dismiss the idea. "Even in the hollows, everyone's got television, internet, and texting. I've read everything about art, especially contemporary artists. It's not like I'm isolated that way."

If he's not Grandma Moses, Henry Darger in his little room, or a schizophrenic locked up in an asylum, what does it mean to be a twenty-first century "outsider," with cell phone and up-to-date awareness of international trends in art?

Limited and repetitious content can characterize outsider art and make us think the artist obsessive, or limited by an unnecessarily constricted world-views, or blocked in thought processes—the sort that turn viewers into nickel psychiatrists. 

It should occur to us that "outsider" may be a genuine point of view, one that may be direct without being naive. In New's case, an artist sophisticated enough to understand the range of alternative ways to express himself visually has actively embraced an "outside" position. For New, his native, genuine point of view looks like the outsider style. He may have chosen it unconsciously, but he's found the best way to express his preoccupation: the love he bears for his wife and for their domestic happiness.

That New’s work is amorous and idyllic may not be what first occurs to viewers of his highly geometrical, mysteriously symbolic drawings. Where is the softness; where are the curves, the smiles, the tenderness, the sense of yielding that are hallmark expressions of love? Instead, the artist has created a symbolic world filled with space-age blackbirds, centaurs, thunderbirds, sphinxes, and mythic or super- humanoids with triangular shoulders, narrow hips, and ringed, target-like eyes. “Romantic” is not the word that leaps to mind.

Yet New told Lindsay last year that, “All the birds, anything with flight you see in my work, are Robin.” The skies of his drawings are alive with birds. If those birds— however geometrical, two-dimensional, or stylized their forms—are the beloved Robin, then they define, simply, how love looks in New’s universe. 

Love is Patient, Love is Kind

New's work is not for impatient viewers. Unless we linger over each piece; unless we deliberately and patiently trace the shifts and rearrangements in his figures and their details, we'll miss not only the statements of love, but their special quality.

Because New's artistic vocabulary at first appears to be impenetrably personal,  there's an impulse to approach the drawings like  hieroglyphic texts, to try to "read" them symbol by symbol, as a series of coded messages that will yield statements. New makes no claim to work programmatically, nor to produce art that can be deciphered. “I don’t even know what they mean,” he told me. “It makes itself through me.” These are statement that artists working in all styles and any media would make.

As far as interpretation goes, New just hopes that viewers will understand that all of his work is “made with love.” He hopes that we will understand that it’s about “love and dreams,” that it’s “sweet and kind.”

            

Viewers still baffled by the black silhouettes, the unsmiling figures, the horns, spears, and temple-rockets are overlooking the deliberate, subtle dynamic of New’s work. New’s model of love—the love we know exists if only in the multitude of flying things—is of something that requires time, attention, and care. No two of these exquisite works are alike. Only the hasty observer would consider them similar; the connoisseur—the lover—would not. That the imagery repeats itself with subtle changes has everything to do with love’s caressing, doting impulse; with the lover’s instincts to adore and to rehearse the beloved's features, and to savor the satisfaction evoked by the very imagination of his love.

Once we think about New’s work in terms of this process, we begin to see more deeply into his imagery. For instance, it's loaded with traditional tools for measuring and building. Whenever he uses hatching along the side of a form to suggest a third dimension, the  marks follow a pattern of varying lengths, as an inch is subdivided along a ruler’s edge. Likewise, the two long, pointed, and footless legs on which all his figures balance form compass arms (like the one undoubtedly used to draw circles all over his pages, the moons and suns and eyes). A form that New uses to represent wings is also that of a plane—the wedged carpenter’s tool—the full end of which is a two-lobed shape—which in turn becomes an asymmetrical heart. The imagery comes from craft, careful and time-consuming; of work done with the hands, of labor done mindful of detail, executed lovingly.

New’s toolbox supplies the architect and builder too. His collages are filled with houses. They fly, they sprout from people’s heads (they are "on the mind");  they form hats with bright ideas. All the houses are  tall with symmetrical wings or buttresses that flank a central tower. The towers suggest cathedrals or castles, those exalted ideas of home as the sacred, private, protective domain. Home is the source of energy too. Sometimes houses appear as rocket ships, tall and pointed, with boosters—sometimes even with wings—attached in case they take off in the skies so busy with zooming creatures and objects. New even provides a navigational tool when he fashions the sun as a compass roses, with rays of different lengths, halved and shaded.

New offered explanations of two details that I'm not sure I'd have grasped on my own. The skull so prominent in his work is a simple memento mori, a reminder of life's sweetness in view of its brevity. The number 13, and its mirror image, 31? He explains that because no one wants the unlucky number, he adopted the poor waif and gave it a home since it's a misfit too. Now that is sweet.

Forever After

Love is represented in New's drawings as domestic, steady, and enduring. It's the source of both creative energy and emotional stability. Love is constructed deliberately. It's carefully maintained so it will last forever. Because love is thus firmly founded, it's liberating—it frees the imagination and lightens the heart.

Finally, New's drawings aren't simply paeans directed one way, from a husband to his to wife. They are loving transactions between husband and wife. Were his works only directed from him to her, then they would come closer to showing the characteristics we associate with obsession. New, however, is always changing his work, inventing and exploring new expression within his world. As in the drawing above, He gazes into Her eyes and She gazes back. This is the work of someone who loves and who feels loved in return. It documents the sweetness of giving and receiving love.

New knows  what he is doing. It's fair to say that he makes outsider art—I can't think of anything that better describes his drawings or thinking that informs them. The twist is that we, his viewers, are the outsiders. Only by emulating the slow, detailed, and attentive processes of the artist himself can we begin to approach the beautiful, private interior or the intimate quality of the love he shares at home, with Robin.

All photographs are copyright, Bruce New, kindly supplied by the artist, and are used with his permission.

About Love

In my next several postings, my topic will be love.

I'll look at artists who are motivated by love to create, and I'll consider the ways they express love in their work.

What is love? Its objects and meanings are as many as lovers. What  I'm interested in are fervor, ardor, and full commitment. I'm interested in the way that love itself defines its object.

So look in the next few days for the beginning of a series that will include essays about the work of outsider artist Bruce New; about one magnificent, defining work by Aminah Robinson; and about a friendship circle of composer-performers, Sal Martirano, Dorothy Martirano, and Morgan Powell.

I hope you'll sign up as a Follower of Starr Review; these essays will come to you automatically when you do.

Stay tuned!
Ann

Authority

In 2005, the Columbus (Ohio) Museum of Art mounted a solo show of Sid Chafetz's work. Chafetz is a  print-maker who had a long career teaching at Ohio State. He's been collected by Museum of Modern Art, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian. He's remained a personal and professional favorite at home, where, through his work, he's kept up a lively commentary on University life and Cow Town culture.

I reviewed that CMA show for The Other Paper, an alternative weekly, and commented that while he made humorous commentaries through his images (a professor in academic regalia runs alongside a cow, prodding it across a green field with a stadium in the background), he didn’t complicate the visual experience beyond the central image. Much of the print’s surface was left essentially empty—undeveloped. I thought his work wasn't well composed, or that it was composed verbally, not visually.

I tell this story with no animus for Professor Chafetz, a very congenial and talented man. The point is that soon after my review ran, I was confronted by his scowling better half who let on that she was highly displeased with my review. I believe that I, still new to Columbus, was probably the first person locally to criticize the artist's work.

"Who was I anyway," to write that review? She had never heard of me.

This is a fascinating question. Had I been Holland Cotter, would the review have been better received? Would my content have been received as a compliment, if I'd flown in from New York to write it?

But of course, I already was someone important; I'd made a difference, though not the one I'd wished for. I wished that she had thought about my comments on Mr. C's composition; I wished she hadn't taken them as character assassination. But for whatever reason she needed to challenge my authority, the assumption was that I had it.

Who am I to write about visual art, music, literature? I make visual art and I write. I listen to music. But, mostly, I observe and think; writing completes the process. At its best, reviewing refines my thoughts and ultimately releases me from the intensity of art experiences that would, otherwise, just blow me away.

My authority doesn't lie in my claim to have it. But it isn't in a list of my credentials either. Authority is a transaction between writer and reader, an exchange of observations and thoughts, a dialectic, I hope, on a stimulating plane.