Aminah Robinson's Presidential Suite, 2016

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Hot Boiling Sun,
watercolor on paper, study. Photo courtesy of
Hammond Harkins Galleries

"Hot Boiling Sun comin' down on me," is what Aminah Robinson wrote on this watercolor study for a the much larger work, Hot Boilin' Sun. So much of what characterizes Robinson's enduring hold on us is condensed into this single sheet.

Look at this woman's right arm, how it travels between muscular and emaciated to end in the huge, sinewy hand. Notice not only the expression of concentration and restraint on her face, so succinctly laid down with unhesitating brush strokes, but the form of her body—the breasts dangling and twisted, the spread of hips and legs that balance visually and literally the vessel of cotton on her slanted shoulders. The position of the figure on the paper is askew, emphasizing the sense of slow, falling; of a moment between stumbling and rising. The twisted body doesn't determine the direction: It's that implacable face that will.

None of the condensed effect of this single study is lost when Robinson transfers and multiplies it to her magnificent, rich, multi-paneled painting, Hot Boilin' Sun.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Hot Boilin' Sun. Mixed media and collage on paper. Courtesy of Hammond Harkins Galleries.
Detail of left panel, below

"Hot Boilin' Sun Comin' Over Me from Sun-Up to Sun-Down Slaves Picked Cotton," is Robinson's inscription. In this complex composition of women and children in the cotton fields, the writhing and twisting of the study's one body is dispersed across the whole, rhythmic panel. The pain and effort are embodied by the group in which each individual is (literally) entwined with her neighbor. Any chains here are the chains of community, shared labor and sisterhood.

Neither are these slaves actually depicted under the hot boilin' sun. To the contrary, they don't stand, but float angelically against a clear blue sky in which they appear to gather not literal cotton, but soft dollops of cloud. These women have crossed over Jordan yet remain in community with one another through a river of shared relationship represented by the graceful, flowing composition of the entire work.

Both of these works, on view through October 9 at Hammond Harkins Galleries in Columbus, are among a vast show of the late Robinson's breathtaking, Presidential Suite, a vast work comprised of many pieces—her unique RaGonNon fabric collages, watercolors, paintings, and writings. 

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, President Barak Hussein Obama from Presidential Suite. RaGonNon: mixed media: fabric
embroidery, buttons, music boxes.

This RaGonNon, Book of Revelations (with its subject, "President Barak Hussein Obama" inscribed on the top panel) is the centerpiece of the Hammond Harkins show: There's more at the Columbus Museum of Art. Any work in the gallery, in any medium, is an offshoot of this magnificent tree. 

In her Presidential Suite, Robinson finds a consummate home for the passions unfailingly embodied in her tremendous body of work: justice, community, and hope that knowledge of the past can inform a better future. For her, President Obama presented the best hope for a future in which the accomplishments of African-Americans would be allowed to shine through the narrative of slavery and repression, fertilizing the ground for more and more to come.

It's central to Robinson's lifetime of work and thought that deep historical knowledge must inform the on-going quest for a better world; without knowing history, one lacks models, mores, and power. This central theme has been reported here in several reviews of her work (see March 8, 2015; May 3, 2012; August 24, 1011.) President Obama's election was not only a political event, but a climactic one in the history of African-American history and culture. The shining history she recorded with such loving passion across her entire career could reassert itself now under a government led by a new exemplar. The point of the Presidential Suite is of past and present joined for a just future.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Hope is to Remember from the Presidential Suite. Mixed media on hand-made paper.
Image courtesy of Hammond Harkins Gallery. Detail below.

With the same flowing motion and interconnection of figures as in her scene of slaves translated to Heaven, Robinson connects Past, Present, and Future in one surge of humans reaching across to one another, forging a chain of hope.

Note the arm and hand gestures here and in Hot Boilin' Sun. The scooping gestures in Hope is to Remember are hand-offs between figured generations; the hands don't curl as the cotton pickers' do. They extend, even though the final (future) gesture is the dropping of—cotton. Throughout the Suite, I think Robinson uses cotton as a symbol that changes with time. Once the subject of forced labor, it becomes part of cultural continuity, softened and imbued with meaning by the laying on of millions of women's hands. Laid however low, slaves and their ancestors have made beauty and meaning even from the depths of direst experience.

Hot Boilin' Sun and Hope is to Remember are works that would dominate any gallery by themselves. In this show, they are among the several pieces that detail the universal messages that Robinson worked into her vision of President Obama's election and years office. (Indeed, she worked on this until her death; a needle and thread remain dangling from a panel. I doubt, however, that Robinson would "complete" anything as long as there was history to investigate and tell, and a future to hold hope for.)

Robinson dedicates the Presidential Suite to family and community, two threads that she saw embodied in Barak Obama and his presidency. In this RagOnNon panel, she brings those ideas together in the most natural way, celebrating the conferring of the Nobel Prize on Obama on the same day as the equally happy occasion of family pet Bo's birthday.

In the panel above this salute, the entire Obama family is depicted enjoying a stroll in the White House Rose Garden, gaily painted in full bloom of red and pink flowers. Pet dog Bo is indeed a family member and, at the end of his leash—represented by festive, patriotic ribbon—pulls the colorful family forward. Notice too that his feet are made of cotton.

Throughout her huge Book of Revelations, The Family and Community Suite, Robinson presses intimate and international together, history with the present day. The history of slavery is literally built into the history of the White House, as Michelle Obama observed, and scenes in Robinson's great work illustrate this. The suffering and the daily joys are all part of the same fabric. Represented by drawing in the left panel, we see slaves making bricks to build the building, their brethren chained together above the title panel. They are part of the African-American family that inhabits the House now, in a better life with a Rose Garden.

Finally, Robinson moves along in the motion so characteristic of her inner and manifest vision, reaching forward into the world. The strip of vignettes at the bottom of the RagOnNon relate the First Family to the Chileans buried alive in a mine as the world watched and prayed for their rescue. "Providencia Street" is one of several panels devoted to relating the Chilean mining disaster rescuees to our President through the generous and unifying world-view the artist took as such a blessing. Here people and animals walk down the colorful town street, awaiting or celebrating the moment of rescue that united the world in relief and joy—the emotions and the vision that Aminah Robinson expressed so magnificently in this unparalleled work of homage, promise, and love.

All photographs in this post are thanks to the excellent work and generosity of Hammond Harkins Gallery.

Jack Whitten's Black Monoliths: Born in Bessemer

Jack Whitten, Black Monolith II: Homage to Ralph Ellison
The Invisible Man, 1994, Acrylic, molasses, copper, salt, coal,
ash, chocolate, onion, herbs, rust, eggshell, razor blade
on canvas, 58 x 52." Brooklyn Museum, William K.
Jacobs Fund 2014.65

Jack Whitten: Five Decades of Painting runs through August 2 at the Wexner Center for the Arts. The show displays fifty works by an artist of outrageous originality and dynamism. So driven by the need to experiment is this man that, were labels withheld, a gallery visitor might reasonably assume this to be a group show of six or seven abstract artists. 

While the show, organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, refers to Whitten as a painter, I think this artist would much more precisely be called a fabricator rather than a painter through much of his career. One often sees this impulse in printmakers and sculptors, for whom innovation with processes and materials can be as important as the glimmer of the image down the road. Whitten works with acrylic paint, but he has rarely made works that would be universally identified as "paintings." He has used acrylic in its liquid form not only to carry pigment for making images, but also for its industrial properties: It is elastic; it can be layered and separated; it can be molded or cut; its colors can be blended or separated in sheets. Acrylic is plastic.

I think the direction of Whitten's artistic inquiry has to have been shaped by location. He was born in 1939 and grew up in Bessemer, Alabama, a close western suburb of Birmingham. Heavy industry dominates the whole region, which is known for ore mining, iron smelting, and the manufacture of railroad cars, including Pullman Standards. Bessemer's African-American population has always hovered around 75%. The labor for the city's vast industries was provided by integrated unions. Whitten's father was a coal miner; his mother was a seamstress. 

1950 map showing heavy industry in Birmingham, Alabama and suburbs. Bessemer would lie in the lower right area, approximately
eight miles from Birmingham.

Whitten's maturity and artistic career have been spent in New York, where he arrived in 1960

during the flowering of the Abstract Expressionist movement. This mid-century milieu is reflected in his work of the period. Whitten worked among the artists of the New York School, particularly with Willem DeKooning, but he apparently maintained an independence from them too, associating himself with other artists of color, and experimenting with his own ideas about abstraction.

Before New York, though, Whitten studied at Tuskegee Institute and then at Southern University in Baton Rouge, where he discovered his vocation for art. His move to New York City had as much to do with his despair over the South's intransigence during the movement for civil rights reform as with any intention to attend Cooper Union—which in fact he did. Entering the art school at 21 was Whitten's first experience as the lone black in a white environment.

Of the many bodies of work represented in Five Decades of Painting, I find myself most fascinated by works begun during the 1990's, the Black Monoliths that honor Whitten's African American heroes and friends. As in the Homage to Ralph Ellison above, each of these is a mosaic composed of thousands of colored tesserae. Each tile is formed from acrylic paint (and any additives). Since detail is difficult to interpret at such a reduced scale as in these pictures, I point out that the tiles don't contain image, only color.

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith IV For Jacob Lawrence, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 96 x 96 in. (243.8 x 243.8cm). Courtesy the artist, Alexander Gray Associates, New York; Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp. ©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann. 

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan), 1998, acrylic collage on canvas, 

69 x 65 ½ in. (175.3 x 166.4cm). Mott-Warsh Collection, Flint, Michigan.

©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. 

Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann. 

Whitten makes no claim that these are attempts at portraiture, though it's difficult not to attach the idea of likeness to them in at least a rough way. The homage to Ralph Ellison, above, takes the form of an anonymous silhouette, the sort we see when a journalist interviews a person whose identity must be protected in order to maintain their safety. In this work though, the silhouette is nevertheless, in layer upon layer of irony, "the only Black in the room." While he is anonymous because he is faceless, he is unmistakable against the unbroken wall of white and blue, the two colors that provide no prayer of invisibility or protective coloration for a Black man. The homage is to the courageous daily bravery of the visually conspicuous, for whom freedom from invisible individuality remains so tortuous and tragic. 

When I encountered Black Monolith IV For Jacob Lawrence—breathtaking at eight feet by eight feet, yet every tessera worthy of scrutiny when you're close to it—I first thought I had come upon a remarkable map of Manhattan, glimmering and demarcated against a dark world. But then, there is also a strong resemblance to a capped (not hooded) smoking silhouette out of a Philip Guston painting—that ambiguous, vaguely threatening, possibly explosive character. Only after that did I see the title referring to Lawrence. Maybe both of my thoughts have a home in this work?

Lawrence's subject was the common life of African Americans—not always a visually attractive subject, given the poor material and social conditions in which so many lived. The series of painting with which he is perhaps most identified is his The Migration of the Negro, which tells the story of rural Blacks moving to the industrial cities of the north. Lawrence lived in New York City most of his life, having spent his earliest years in New Jersey, and moving with this wife to Seattle when he was in his fifties.

Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, Panel One, 1941. Posted
 in accordance with fair use principles on Wiki Art.

Maybe it is a map of Manhattan, white Manhattan with conspicuous dikes raised against a coal-black sea. As an homage to Lawrence, perhaps Whitten reflects bleakly on African-American migration to cities where they haven't ultimately been integrated or their lives bettered? Where they remain immigrants? The Gustonian, alienated smoker neither sees nor  responds. He doesn't wear a hood anymore, but his anonymous indifference testifies to his enduring hostility.

However one interprets the particulars, Black Monolith IV strikes me overall as a phenomenal commentary on immigration in the 21st century. It is certainly the most pressing issue of our time as Africans, Middle Easterners, and Central Americans—people of color—risk all to reach Europe and America, whose nations bravely fight the tide and erect walls of all sorts against them.

I love Whitten's Black Monolith III (For Barbara Jordan) if only because it's not monolithic. A monolith is not only massive, but it is coherent and unified—which this so conspicuously is not. Whitten has also altered the shape of his support, giving it "shoulders" and sloping its sides inward toward the bottom: like a memorial or gravestone? Like a figure? 

The disposition of black and white tiles, while interspersed, nevertheless tends to converge in the suggestion of a torso. This notion is strengthened by the column that rises at the center top, out of the picture like a neck, giving the image the sense of an x-ray. Is that big dark shape a massive heart? This body lacks clear edges, quite unlike the others in the Monolith series and, again, contrary to the definition of the word. Perhaps this suggests Jordan's aptitude for politics, that art of compromise, of dancing between black and white to move people together while respecting the rights of those on the edges? The name for monolithic politics is tyranny.

 Jack Whitten, Black Monolith, V Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 84 x 63 in. (213.4 x 160cm). Collection of Sheldon Inwentash and Lynn Factor, Toronto. ©2015 Jack Whitten/Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.

The experience of Full Circle: For LeRoi Jones A.K.A. Amiri Baraka is like looking at the Earth from a space ship, or through a telescope on the moon. The best part about it is that all the life of the universe is encapsulated on our planet, for there are no stars and no hint of any other life in a sky that is impenetrably black. It is a wonder that Whitten could manufacture so black a black as the space that surrounds this globe.

The globe, however, is infinity. By creating intensity at the center with lots of color and small elements, Witten draws the eye in ever deeper and we eagerly search beyond what we see. Though this caption provided identifies the materials here as "acrylic," it is a great jumble of collaged materials, not all of which are made of acrylic: There are lots of found materials as well, colorful, hard scraps of life.

In this there is almost no contrast between black and white. The edge is between blank black and black that is filled with color: with idea, life, and, above all, the representation of deep time. Here's an image of the history of the world in Baraka's color—all of his colors: the colors of thought, idea, travels, loves. This is also a mirror, it seems, for any viewer. You look at it less than you look into it. As you do, it's impossible not to want to find something, to see what you relate to, to pick out your place. In the other Monoliths, there are boundaries to consider and we are asked to deal with their significances for us. This one is different. The boundary is the ends of the earth and we cannot but fall in.

Viewing Whitten's Black Monoliths, I continue to be nagged by the memory of another artist from Bessemer, the wonderful self-taught artist, Thornton Dial. Dial was born in 1928 (Whitten in '39) and work in the fields before he moved to the city where he was a metal worker, in the Pullman factory particularly. Much of his art is sculpture made from re-purposed found materials, from tin cans to mattress springs. 

I think that there is a kinship between Whitten and Dial in that they share a deep central aesthetic of fabrication born in Black, industrial Bessemer. Dial was a manual laborer; Whitten was not. But I believe that Whitten's youth in a city that was all about manufacture, mining, and callous-producing labor affected his outlook as a visual artist. Five Decades of Fabrication?

Walkin' Down the Long Street: Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson at 75

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Hog Hammock
 Community. Buttons, beads, crayon,
 pen on paper. Framed: 19 x 16 inches
Courtesy Hammond Harkins Gallery

It would be so easy to frame the story of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson as the great American tale of rags to riches. Brought up in an African-American family in Columbus, Ohio public housing, soaked in the stories of a great aunt who recalled the horrors not only of slavery but of the Middle Passage, the child of material poverty grows up to be an abandoned single mother, raising her child alone on welfare, then to have her son die as a young man. Yet she endures and works, refusing to let poverty interfere with art-making, her calling. She relies on the support of artist mentors in the African-American community. She sells her work to anyone she can persuade to buy it until one day, after years of focus, one day after she's turned sixty, the MacArthur Foundation rings her up. Finally, she's rich! And, the world discovers, she's a genius!

Great story, and in certain facts true, but essentially all wrong. Robinson's story is of riches to riches, or perhaps from rags to rags. In the great body of work on display now at Hammond Harkins Gallery in Bexley, Ohio, the show celebrating Robinson's 75th Birthday, we see no changes of theme or even materials in work that spans over 60 years. Wherever she's been in time and place, whatever she's owned, we see that she's an artist who has always had access to what she needed. Past. Future. Community Memory and Race Memory. Love and Anger in passionate degree. And the sharpness of observation that we call Vision. With those, rags will always do. In fact, they are the most precious material of all.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, The Crowman.

Buttons, beads, cloth, thread, crayon, pen on Hosho

 paper. Framed: 16 ¾ x 14 inches. Courtesy

Hammond Harkins Gallery

Robinson was trained in drawing by her father, to whom she attributes her ability to see quickly and deeply. These skills were enhanced at what is now Columbus College of Art and Design. Were she to have made a career of draftsmanship alone, she would be one of our great artists—a great portraitist, for she reveals worlds in her drawings of individuals. 

The Crow Man appears many times in her works memorializing Poindexter Village, where she grew up. Many of those works are on a grand scale, picturing the whole neighborhood, where individuals are represented with only a stroke or two. In portrait drawings like these, we see who they are and what they mean. As in nearly all of Robinson's work, she does not allow the elegant drawing itself suffice to portray the depths or to communicate the importance of this person. When she was a child, the Crowman was a king—a source of wonder, friendship, and awe. He may have been someone most of us would see as a street person. She bestows upon him a winged crown—a bird that trusted him—and gives him brilliant rags that serve the role of royal robes. Rags are central to his richness.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Themba.
Cloth, gouache, cowry shells, string on heavy stock
Framed: 57 ¼ x 28 ¼ inches. Courtesy
Hammond Harkins Gallery

Another form of Robinson portrait reverses the proportion of drawing and collage in a way that makes the drawing even more forceful and tender. In this life-sized portrait of her great-aunt Themba, It's clear where the woman's force lies. The swaddling fabric scraps give her volume and definition in the sense that they delimit her: they keep her human. The simplicity of the forms in this piece help us understand Themba as more human than goddess, while the size hints that her impact transcends the mortal.  

The size of the hands in this portrait is a hallmark of Robinson's women and elders, who are protectors and vessels. They preserve history, mores, and cultural wisdom. In doing so, they watch out for the current generation and those to come. This Themba, so simplified yet so particular, is both the wise woman who suffered horrors, yet endured to pass her spirit and knowledge into Aminah; and she is the mother of us all, the mother who asks us to continue her inherited values of love, respect, and reflection.

Robinson uses cowrie shells to sew together the two sheets of paper that form this drawing, those shells being reminders of Africa, whence Themba was forcibly carried to the United States. The picture that opens this article is also of Themba in the Hog Hammock community where she first lived on Sapelo, a barrier island off Georgia. In that portrait, her vision is enhanced with glass button eyes as she stares into the future of her community (the current population is under 50). Robinson does not make of Themba a goddess, but she does admit her role of seer.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Themba, Healer,
Herbalist, Prophet. First page of fabric book. Author photo.

The current Hammond Harkins show is particularly rich in Robinson's fabric and book works, works in which the artist not so much moves beyond drawing, but into it. In many works on paper, she begins with dry or wet drawing media, then enhances or ennobles her subject by the addition of scraps, buttons, or beads. These collaged materials serve the role of riches: They are the incrustations with which Medieval artists responded to devotional needs; they are the decorations with which animist tribal artisans responded to their spiritual communions. 

In the large format book, Themba: Healer, Herbalist, Prophet, the woman is portrayed with features represented by cowrie shells and a green button mouth. behind her (on the right side of the page) a wide-eyed, shadow Themba exerts (or shares) a forcefield with the figure to the left—another representation of Themba? 

For Robinson, the same person is, I believe, rendered observationally in every form of representation she makes. Themba with shell features sending stitch powers; the one whose face and hands dominate her physical being; the one with beads sewn onto on a portrait head drawn as if by Leonardo: In the mind and in the eyes of Robinson, all these portraits are one and all are real. Rags? Riches? Distinction is absurd; category and compartmentalization are absurd. The reason Robinson gets up at 4:30 in the morning and works in solitude all day is because expression of insight is such difficult work, requiring endless effort. To overcome the viewers' habits of distinction, to cultivate awareness of common wisdom, is the work of a lifetime for Themba's legatee.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Aminah’s Blackberry Patch,
 1800-1930: Before Poindexter Village. Carved, dyed, and sewn
leather with five insets (insets are mixed media). 18 ½ x 11 x 2 ¼"
 (closed). Dedication: “Gift to My Son – Sydney E. Robinson on
his 15^th Birthday, 1982.” Courtesy of Hammond Harkins
Gallery.

Robinson's brilliant books are well represented in this show. The book as an art form is a favorite form for contemporary artistic exploration. Shows of artists' books often concentrate on what can be made of the codex form. Robinson experiments with the codex as vehicle, but she does not play with the central concept of the book as The Word—as the means of communicating  enduring, valuable content. In her hands, the book is why we weep over the floods that destroy libraries, and why we shudder to hear of the Taliban's wholesale destruction of ancient monuments. By means of books, civilization preserves the memory of culture. This is emphatically what Robinson's books are meant to do.

Opposite side of Aminah's Blackberry
Patch, 1982. Author photo.

Aminah's Blackberry Patch takes the form of a large leather portfolio into which smaller cases fit, holding fold-up, paper books of drawings that picture the busy African-American neighborhood of Aminah's childhood in Columbus. A gift for her son in 1982, this too is a vessel and an embracing, a gift that passes along memory and heritage. As a work of art, it manifests all of Robinson's quickness and control: the supreme confidence of her direct carving into the leather—the way she gives the impression of spontaneous writing on the inner flaps, paired with the neatness of the lacing and the perfectly-fit composition of the faces on the cover and back panel. 

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, Vol. 3 -- “Life Throbs, the Neighborhood (1800 – 1930), Blackberry Patch.” Crayon, pen, buttons, thread on paper. Contains four “pages.” Closed: 9 ½ x 11 ½ inches. Open: 10 x 41 inches. Courtesy, Hammond Harkins Gallery.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson,
Emancipation Day, September 22,
1900, Blackberry Patch.
Author photo.

Aminah Robinson, detail of Emancipation
Day, September 22, 1900, Blackberry
Patch. Author Photo.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, detail from Emancipation Day,
September 22, 1900, Blackberry Patch. Author photo.

Robinson creates books of overwhelming size, books so big that they are banners, so big that they fill walls. These are books that I compare to stained glass windows because they tell stories of broad cultural importance, and do it in a form that glorifies the content. Her commemoration of Emancipation Day is a collection of individual panels, each of which could stand alone, but which, all together, remind the viewer of many reasons to celebrate everyday African-American life. This, as so often in Robinson's work, takes the form of the folk life that binds the two continents. Emancipation is understood as a holiday of American Black folk. But Robinson strives to link the emancipated American to a heritage of first freedom, when Americans were Africans. She makes these connections through allusions to folk life fed by deep ties to legacies people might not even recognize as ancestral. In this panel, children play the game "Bird in the cage." In Themba: Healer, Herbalist and Prophet, she illustrates the custom of jumping the broom. This was a practice of enslaved couples trying to form permanent, wedded unions, which hearkens back to West Africa.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, scene of
jumping the broom from Themba: Healer,
Herbalist and Prophet. Author photo.

The "bird in the cage" and "jumping the broom" pages illustrate two manners of Robinson's work in "folkloric" styles, which are clearly masterfully considered and controlled. Whether she uses stick figures or expressive, exaggerated figures, each of her many styles is chosen carefully and used to convey the values invested in her subjects. 

One of the materials Robinson uses as prolifically as she uses paint or ink is buttons. In some of the work, buttons are virtually the sole material—buttons and some underpinning to hold them all together. Many understand these bright, common, utilitarian closures as her popular signature. I sometimes wonder if the charm of buttons don't lure viewers not merely to the work but straight past its passionate messages. 

The use of buttons, pins, and similar trinkets, however, points to yet another aspect of Robinson's almost explosively-laden art. Buttons have the functional and symbolic power to bring two sides together, but they can also serve, as any pretty small thing can, as a medium of exchange. Like coins, marbles, beads, or shells, buttons can be traded, offered, acquired. They can make a person rich. They can be used as people in European traditions use gemstones, to decorate and to denote special objects as precious.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, book cover, Family Treasures. Author photo.

The cover of the large, wall-mounted book, Family Treasures, shows a document that is twice-precious. It is family history, which is sacred, and it is preserved in book form. This comes literally encrusted, literally like a treasure that tempts the hand to scoop into it. The appliquéd title appears to be sunken beneath a layer of gems. Yet if the reader clicks on this photograph for a larger view, it's clear that none of the buttons are particularly noteworthy in themselves—just as an aggregation of coins in itself need amount to nothing. Rags to riches. Riches to riches.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, first page, Family Treasures. Author photo.

The page that follows depicts two women dancing, the one in a dress fashioned from a showy beadwork appliqué. Along the edge of the adjoining cover are tubular beads that Robinson may well have acquired on one of her trips to West Africa. If those beads have the significance we usually assign to items of exotic origin, that value sinks quietly into the fabric of the book. The detail our eyes value is the gaudy appliqué that forms the dress, which could be a scrap cut from a an elderly relative's castoff. Exotic commonness and familiar exotica; riches both.

Robinson works in so many ways that have arisen and disappeared only to rise again in the the current of her long career; and since she works literally without interruption in her home, where she eschews media connections and keeps her landline phone number most private; it is difficult to generalize about anything that may be representative of her "current" work. But I was mesmerized by a tiny work from 2014 that appears to bring to refined, essential form all she values of African and Western traditions; of nurture, elder wisdom, and of cultural memory preserved in word and in artifact. This is a "roll book" that incorporates a doll figure of a woman into the structure of a book.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 2014. Roll book
with female figure. View 1, exterior. Author photo.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 2014. Roll book
with female figure. View 2, exterior. Author photo.

The piece is made of black and white cloth  and knitting scraps, ornamented with buttons and beads of white and silver. The fabrics are homely, but the ornaments, applied with red thread, are most artistically chosen to lend a luxurious trim and texture to a figure that would once have been considered (and is, no doubt still, in some quarters) a "Mammy." The sparkling glass; the variegated ceramic beads; the magnificent silver butterfly brooch are like a lifetime's accumulated wealth in which this woman is garbed. Her riches are at once real and metaphorical. 

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, 2014. Roll book
with female figure. View 3, interior. Author photo.

In an exquisite condensation of meaning and materials, though, we find that the doll is in fact the opening of a book. Its tiny, velvet pages turn wordlessly, each decorated with a beautiful frame of  virtual gems and pearls. In this book there are no words, and no representations of historical or autobiographical scenes. The work itself seems to represent the value of memory itself, or of history. The doll is a kind of guardian angel, a woman whose dignity is earned from her age and experience of labor in the past, all refined now to pearls of wisdom, placed in the hands of the bearer. It's an invitation to use the future as wisely as others have preserved the past in written and spoken history. Perhaps she suggests that our books of days—so tiny, precious, and intimate—will fill up and wipe themselves clean effortlessly in the course of time.

Since she was ten, it's been Robinson's mission to preserve and transmit the values she learned from Themba, a visionary born in Africa, brought to America as a servant beast, who lived for a century to reveal the importance of history to an intuitive great-niece. Robinson's gift comes without hauteur, powered by the heat of conviction and of talent, raw and practiced. In what most of us call scraps and discards, she uses her talents as thread and buttons to sew together African prehistory with the stories of her own childhood and her mentors for the benefit of untold kin for millennia to come. 

At 75, Robinson reveals through a lifetime of work that she is an artist comfortable in her own inheritance as seer, historian and conservator of her culture. This isn't work that could be done by anyone who thinks of herself as a genius. It's the work of a woman who doesn't see rags.

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, detail from Folklife in Columbus Ohio 1957, altered spinning wheel sculpture. Mother pushing baby carriage; baby with bottle. Inscription reads, "Walkin' down Long Street." Music box installed in Mother figure. Author photo.

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For other articles on Aminah Robinson in Starr Review, see:

May 3, 2012: Aminah Robinson's Oral History for the Hard of Hearing

August 29, 2011: Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson: Knowing Love from Where She Sits

Noah Purifoy's Outside: the Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum

Noah Purifoy, Shelter. Joshua tree in foreground.

Noah Purifoy, interior of
Shelter

My children have got me into most of life's great experiences and so it was once again that through my daughter's reconnoitering I visited Noah Purifoy's home and Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum in the Mojave Desert. We entered when the early morning shadows cast by the cactuses of greater Joshua Tree, California were still long on the sand. This collection opens very early in the morning. Empty parking spaces for five and six cars abut a neighbor's property across the unpaved road, and neither guards nor doors nor walls enforce the posted hours of operation. The Museum is just there: a circus, a shrine, a stunning collection of sculpture and installation existing as a fact of life, an integral part of the desert landscape demarcated only by an occasional barrier of inclusion. We enter the Purifoy site as we enter a theater and see the stage, with imaginations tingling. The only limits here are set by our own capacities to appreciate the unity of action set before us.

Noah Purifoy, Bowling Balls. One of
three bowling ball towers.

In 1989 Purifoy left Los Angeles, where he had been a founding member of the Watts Towers Arts Center in 1964. He had gleaned rubble from the infamous race riots to use as sculptural materials, and he continued to use found materials for the rest of his career. He moved his practice to Joshua Tree, where he spent the last fifteen years of his life. On his ten acres he created over a hundred works from discarded materials. 

Noah Purifoy. Possibly, Three Witches. It was hard
for me to keep up with titles as the map of the site is
schematic and nothing is labeled. But the interplay of
Art and Nature is wonderful and not unusual.

In popular imagination, people who retreat to the desert are saints, hermits, or kooks. Wise men go for spiritual discipline and reflection; monomaniacs discover that odd kingdoms await them there. These people re-enter society either as Jesus or as Brian David Mitchell, the prince of a two-person sect of child abductors. People who go to the desert are rarely like the rest of us.

The desert symbolizes circumstances of deprivation with no joy. But the power of symbols lies in their lack of specificity, so we don't imagine the desert in any detail, as a place with properties beyond absences. When we think of the lives of hermits and saints and outcasts, we don't envision the desert earth as nurturing flora and fauna; we don't think of the vistas, sunsets, or the subtle gardens at their feet. The actual, living desert inspires habits of alertness, observation, and awe. Its phenomena exist on a very broad scale—as vast as the endless sky, as minute as sand-dwelling insects built for survival.

Noah Purifoy. Rear, Ode to Frank Gehry. Foreground, Sixty-five Aluminum Trays.

When Purifoy moved to the desert, he must have been profoundly aware of both the symbolic and specific power of the place, for it's not only his genius as a sculptor that is so moving, but it's his genius as an artist in the fullest sense—his ability to see beyond what he has his hands on. On his property one encounters not only the many sculptures, but also the size of the space itself, the infinite sky, the continuous desert, and the cactuses that grow undisturbed among the many man-made phenomena. In his museum,  the visitor never loses consciousness of the environment and its components of sand, plants, sun, and sky. Purifoy clearly considered and built with those in mind. They unify the property and they unify his efforts across time. He uses cactuses to pull together groups of several sculptures, or, sometimes, he places artworks with a cactus as the focal point. Purifoy's use of his complex setting reveals the observational basis for his art that seems at first encounter marked by pure imagination.

Noah Purifoy, one car in the long train he built on the site

Purifoy's property is on the edge of a Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center. His desert retreat was not obtained for the purposes of landscape painting; he seems not to have inspired other artists to follow or colonize around him. Whether he was visited by agents, gallerists, and curators, I do not know, but the site is so unified and concentrated that it's difficult to imagine anything obtruded on his focus there. The Foundation quotes Purifoy with saying, "I do not wish to be an artist. I only wish that art enables me to be," words that reinforce the impression the Outdoor Museum conveys, that this work was made from inner compulsion, not for reasons of career.

The photograph (left) shows where Purifoy segregated his accumulated materials or, as any self-respecting neighbor would call it, his junk. Every scrap that appears in his constructions is used with self-conscious wit, grace, humor and punch. The space—as large and composed of hundreds of thousands of individual elements as it is—feels animated by the life stored in those myriad parts and activated by their use in artworks. Because it's clear that nothing is arbitrary in this world, the effect is musical. There are naturally-occuring vibrations, like sound-waves; particular harmonies generated by a place so perfectly and intuitively orchestrated. I've experienced nothing like this—visual unity of such a vast scale—outside of grand gardens, symmetrical in plan. 

Noah Purifoy, No Contest. The "building" is a facade.

It's unusual to find as little repetition in a body of work as one does in the Outdoor Museum. "Outsider" artists may   limit themselves throughout life to a single approach, material, or style. Contemporary academy-trained artists produce bodies of work, based on a career model of development that assumes ever more favorable judgment awaits their ever-changing work, where change equals improvement. 

In art—in every enterprise—the perception that one has succeeded is a great inducement to continue doing the same thing: Success is seductive, even when it's damaging to broader expression of creativity. But here, Purifoy has built buildings one can enter; he's constructed facades, earthworks, towers. There are abstract sculptures, simulacra, miniature environments; some works are busy and elaborated, and others are no more than the barest suggestions of form. There are works that focus attention on the environment, the church, or on art itself. It seems that nothing recurs.

Noah Purifoy, Sculpture made from the aluminum
tube frames of patio chairs, enhanced by shadows

Alone in the desert, though, liberated from the effects of outside judgment, what is there to short-circuit the exploratory impulse? I believe that this extraordinary place is testimony to the stifling effect that organized Art can have on the connection between creative impulse and individual production. Under the sun on the Mojave Desert, Purifoy would have experienced little daily commentary, opinion, or intrusion on his creative independence. Of course he could have built nothing but gates for fifteen years—anything is possible. But his setting seems to have given him the privacy to fill mental and spiritual as well as physical space and he did it in a broad and balanced way, without expressing any observable need for self-replication.

Noah Purifoy, detail of architectural
installation with ornamental and structural use
of toilets, reminiscent of classical columns

Again, the desert sun both reflects and shines like a spotlight on Purifoy's achievement. It seems to move with the viewer among the works on the site, calling attention to the uniqueness of each—to its relationship to its environment, its outstanding form, materials, and spirit.

Separate Purifoy from the art world; isolate him in the desert, away from the commerce of galleries, from separated and denominated museum rooms (Black, Contemporary, American, Twentieth-Century); remove him from having to hear, speak, or interpret Art's professional jargon—do all these things and you can come up with Purifoy as a genuine outsider artist. 

In Purifoy's personal garden adjacent to his trailer
home.

The CV available on the Noah Purifoy Foundation site makes it evident that Purifoy did not at all fit the technical definition of an outsider: He had an art degree, many solo shows, prestigious fellowships and awards. But could these facts ever make an insider of an Alabama-born Black Angelino, whose mature period work is formed from the rubble of an infamous race riot? It seems to me that it's a very doubtful proposition. Socially and psychologically, there would be much to place him as an outsider.

But as an artist, Purifoy strikes me as an outsider in the best, most liberated, enviable sense. The Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum is a brilliant, unique place created only by an artist contented with own thoughts and imagination. He appears to have turned out his ideas with a patient spontaneity untarnished by vogues, criticism, or suggestions. The harmonious mixture of calm and excitement I felt there undoubtedly had to do with Purifoy's outsider perspective: He put himself beyond everything that is usual but extraneous to the central work of an artist, which should be observing, thinking about, and doing what is most important to him. How far out can you go? Here, Purifoy is, in every aspect of his work and life, a nonpareil—excellent and right.

This site is an inspiration to any artist in any medium. That this place is so suffused with its creator's values shows the excellence of stepping wholly away from organized art's—from society's—congested sphere of comparison. The desert is purifying and solitude is refining. It's hard for me to conclude otherwise after visiting this sacred place, Noah Purifoy's Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. 

Panorama of Purifoy's Joshua Tree Outdoor Museum. Photo by Margaret Starr.