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.

"Summer Ponds—New Work by Betsy DeFusco" at the Ohio State Faculty Club

How lovely to have a backyard pond like Betsy Furlong DeFusco does, with time to contemplate its inspiration on canvas, in color. "It's very relaxing to sit and watch the fish swimming around endlessly in a swirl of color, and I soon became engaged in seeing a whole world of activity in a tiny body of water. I am constantly inspired by the different worlds in nature and by the act of painting itself as I explore the edge between abstraction and representation," she tells us in the statement she prepared for her large exhibition, which hangs at the Ohio State University Faculty Club through October 28.

Betsy DeFusco, Seasnake Sushi 2. Oil on wood panel, 9 x 12."
(Leafy vines decorate the fish shapes like strings of festive lights draped from a balcony at an oceanside resort.)

While DeFusco's work begins with observation, her interest in invented color moves the paintings toward abstraction, as do her simplification of forms and her evident interest in the decorative. This show is genuinely delicious. It is restful, peaceful, alluring. The floating forms of water lily pads with goldfish idling among them soothe as much painted in intense pastels as would their real—and less vivid—originals. Her strong colors, softened by applied layers of transparent glazes, read at a distance as water color rather than oil because they are sheer and give the illusion of translucent overlap. Seasnake Sushi 2 is such a work, an expression of exuberance created by color, shape, line, and the artist's ability to use them as she will.

Betsy DeFusco, Floating Colors 2. Oil on wood
panel, 16-3/4 x 21-3/4."

Any painter who chooses water lilies  and a pastel palette to work in is bound to be compared to Monet; DeFusco is wide open to this comparison, with her luscious colors and dreamy, floating forms. It's wise to remember, though, that Monet's mission was entirely different: He was a student of light, intent on rendering reality in a new way, working to represent. 

I'm not so sure that this is DeFusco's mission, however beguiling her palette. While in Floating Colors we can imagine blue water giving over to green, or the play of shadows on water having this color effect, the lack of detail in the lily pads tells us that the artist is not out to convince us about the nature of what she saw. What she "captured" was a vision, in which a scene of lily pads on water was an inspiration for a foray into color, her emotional and imaginative center. Another basic thing to notice is DeFusco's evenhanded brushwork. In Floating Colors, as in many of the pieces in this show, the strong strokes back and forth show no impulse to mimic nature. They shuttle across the scene to form a scrim and to create an impossible simultaneous motion suggested by the cuts in the leaves: Some move to the left, others to the right, all on the same current. (If you inspect images on her Facebook page, linked above, you can get a better sense of these surfaces.)

In DeFusco's series of small-scale lily pad paintings, a favorite of mine is Near the Shore.

Betsy DeFusco, Near the Shore. Oil on wood panel,
16-3/4 x 21-3/4."

The forms in this work fill the picture plane in sizes and more complicated relation than in some, suggesting a possible reality for the leaves. At the same time, the edges of the forms are indistinct and, compared to most of the work in the show, the colors are very muted; I feel that I have to rub something from my eyes to get close enough to the picture. 

I think that DeFusco has hit a particular sweet spot here, between painting a scene and painting a dream. The strong horizontal brush strokes that span the surface of the painting once again lend a quiet dynamic to what appears to be a cool and settled scene.

Betsy DeFusco, Swimming Through. Oil on wood
panel. 12 x 12."

Two more small paintings won my heart, two that read as realistic. Swimming Through features a sturdy gold fish, not abstract at all, swimming in clear water just below a few small lily pads. The water is gray-blue. The plants are green. The fish is gold. All the elements are painted with sufficient detail to convey a sense of their reality.

I like the point of view. I like it that we are situated so that we are looking absolutely straight down at this fish. I can't quite imagine how I got here—so close and so directly above—without disturbing the quiet calm of the scene. I feel like I'm in a privileged place. It's special, but it's not abstract. What's even more special is that it is obviously fleeting. While there is a lot of implied movement in DeFusco's work, this is both a fish and the fish. It's not one of a mass of moving forms. We know which way it's going, and that it will soon be gone. There's a drama in this fleeting scene that the more lively and crwded paintings cannot have. 

 I also enjoy the muted colors of the painting, especially in contrast to those around it. DeFusco loves the pinks and bright tropical colors, so her show is quite a brilliant experience. That Swimming Through feels like something self-sufficient and happy in its calm literal expression is especially refreshing in context.

Autumn Pond shares with Swimming Through this nod toward literal reality. Both paintings move into a contemplative space as a result, a space that the more colorfully abstract paintings don't occupy. The distance between this and Seasnake Sushi 2 is vast.

Betsy DeFusco, Autumn Pond. Oil on wood panel,
12 x 12."

  

The focus of this painting is very clear; the subject is the yellow lilly pad trailing a tendril that disappears out of the bottom left corner. There is a distinctly dynamic aspect to the composition. Even though it is not a swift or driving picture, there is a sense of something to come that adds purpose and story. The yellow form crosses a background line, moving from gray-blue water into water clear enough to reflect foliage in all its true, deep and brooding green color. A flat, stucco pink leaf intrudes at the top margin from DeFusco's abstract and artificial world. 

I'm happy to accept this embassy from the other side. It's beautiful and it reminds me of the edge that DeFusco works. But it doesn't undo this lovely moment of reality, when a resting leaf floats between two worlds, becalmed between the aesthetic of color combinations and the truth of incipient decay. 

If DeFusco's show has any major flaw, it's that there is too much work in it. She has produced a prodigious body of paintings on a few subjects in a special, tight pallet. I think she would be better served by withholding some and piquing the appetite for more. But beautiful it is. For the art lover who watches the leaves change with a sense of regret, this is the show to see to cling to the sweetness of warm days and long, slow, contemplative days of ripe beauty.  

Linda Gall's "Old Wood & Ancient Haunts"

Linda Gall, Loose Wires, watercolor, 6 x 9," 2014. Courtesy
of Hammond Harkins Gallery

Linda Gall's watercolors showing at the Hammond Harkin Gallery in Bexley, Ohio can be described only by their own, eccentric presences. Old Wood & Ancient Haunts? I accede to her title because the show is decidedly narrative and so it deserves to be called something. But the narrative is up to you, the viewer. There's a lot of time-worn wood featured in it. Ancient haunts? Does that mean the sagging old farm and ranch buildings? I suppose it that's one way to look at it. But there is room to see a multitude of haunts in this work that seduces not only by its beauty, but by its vivid peculiarity.

"Loose Wires" is the simplest piece in this show, but it contains the essence of the fascination her work holds for me. The wires are loose, but they are not disconnected. It appears that the stakes are loose and it is the wires that hold them together. The posts are firmly planted and the pieces of what are probably broken wood between hang loose. (They remind me of clothes pins.) They dangle before/above/beneath…what? In this painting made from observation, there is no setting, no context. Gall shows us what, but "where" is defined only by the blank page. Out of this, she nonetheless convinces of contrasting stability of posts and instability of the web between—as if this were in the Real World. Could be. Maybe not.

As a watercolorist, Gall is self-taught. Perhaps this explains why her command of the medium is so thrilling: Nothing holds her back. Her range is considerable: The colors are a mix of brilliant and saturated with dull; her edges run the gamut from sharpest to wet and dissolving. An exciting  "painting without a net" quality brings every work alive—or, it allows the life of the work to seize you. These truly freehand paintings are done without any pencil plotting or guidelines. The daring delivery of paint adds to the thrill of her odd and ambiguous subjects.

Linda Gall, Troubadours, Watercolor, 17 x 36," 2014. Courtesy of Hammond Harkins Gallery.

Troubadours, above, is quintessential Gall. On an unpainted (empty?) sheet of paper, a utilitarian farm structure in disrepair sits athwart us and a Rococo figurine of a boy and a woman with a guitar faces us directly. The originals for the structures in Gall's work inhabit the landscape around her New Mexico home. They have been observed and we assume that the likenesses are genuine. 

Linda Gall, Annie O. Acrylic on panel, 20" x 24." 2014? Image courtesy
of Hammond Harkins Gallery

As here, Gall has populated many series of work over the years with selections from a wide assortment of china figurines. As a toddler will use any figure at hand, regardless of its look, to represent a character in his or her play fantasy, so these figurines seem to function for Gall. They hold places for imaginations; they represent whomever we want them to be, from whatever period and place we wish. They will stimulate viewers to their own story-making within the setting the painter has begun to make. 

In another essay about this show, I noticed that these represented china pieces were called "tiny figurines," as if they are equivalent to the things from which she modeled them. They are, of course, not tiny at all, unless we agree that the buildings are tiny too. Otherwise, the figures are as large as people in relation to the buildings that we take to be so real. Aren't both real realistically copied? It is up to us to reconcile this and to devise a world from these elements she's posited just as she has against a page with nothing else to refer to. Gall has messed with us, knowing how our expectations of scale will make us see what cannot be and take it to be reality.

The paintings are filled with implied anachronism, impossible placement of global elements, and wildly skewed scale. The pictures can be Toyland or even Christian creche tableaux where the figurines stand not so much for persons as for spiritual figures with significance enhanced by humble architecture. I'm intrigued by the figure in Annie O. with her innocence and Marian blue, waiting for something to happen in that stable...

Linda Gall, Wagon Train, acrylic on panel, 24" x 36." Image courtesy of Hammond Harkins Gallery.

Into these play settings, the hands of children or adults could obtrude from above to place and arrange elements of their choosing to tell the stories they wish. The Christmas story. Gunfight at O.K. Corral. Occupy Dodge City. The Duke and Duchess at University. In Wagon Train, above, it is impossible not to see Gall's toys as the children's wagon train rolls in naive placement across the foot of the painting, drawn by a kitty cat in an engine with a Santa figure waving from the canvas-clad "caboose." The collapsing building itself looks like a train, dragging its worn-out self along on a rusty wheel. The yellow sign warns automobile drivers of falling rocks. Is this the ultimate race with no winner? The foolish side of America's rush to the West and what it has finally done to people and landscape?

Linda Gall, Something of a Pile of Posts, watercolor, 6" x 9." Courtesy of Hammond
Harkins Gallery.

Gall delivers a lot through irony, which is created by juxtapositions. She is a master at the creation of gaps and pits and blanks for us to fall into, but in those places we find the significance of her work. She makes toys; she's a comedienne most of the time, drily delivering commentary on the stories that we will make once she's set us up.

I think this is why I prize so highly these tiny, simple watercolors with very little painted on them. Like Loose Wires at the top, Something of a Pile of Posts is divested of irony, drama, implication—of almost everything but gesture and the emotion that comes with it. A pile of posts. Clods, unfeeling, dumb. But here they have tendency, yearning, and, despite their weathered years, an aspiration or urge to grow. Gall loves narratives, and I guess there is one in a painting like this, but it is a concise one, and it is straight faced. The poignancy isn't disguised by the color and wit.

Holocaust Memories from Rural Poland: Esther Nisenthal Krinitz at the Columbus Museum of Art

Black and white are the colors of the Holocaust. The black and white starkness of documentary images result simply from the available technology of the 1940s. Respectful subdued tones follow suit as if to add color would be to pile unbearable sensation onto images and memories already overwhelming in color-drained grayscale.

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Swimming in the River, 1978. Embroidery on linen. Art and Remembrance.

So I was surprised when I walked into the gallery where Fabric of Survival: The Art of Esther Nisenthal Krinitz is showing at the Columbus Museum of Art until June 14. Filled with textiles detailing the memories of a Holocaust survivor, the room is alive with bucolic scenes of nature sewn from vari-colored fabric, crewel, and embroidery threads. Krinitz's hand-sewn tableaux feature Polish village life and landscape—backgrounds durable enough in memory to have survived all that the Nazis perpetrated; scenes in which the Nazis in fact seem dwarfed by the fields and forests around them. 

These scenes of rivers, grain, and gardens remained vivid enough that when Krinitz began recording her childhood at age fifty, the horrors remained contained in images of a world much larger than the certainty of the death that only she and her sister, out of the whole family, escaped.

The tapestry above was the first she made, in 1978. She recollects her childhood home before the war. She and her brother swim in the river while their sisters look on. The villagers come and go about their tasks, and benign Nature dominates. Her house is big and solid, the size of a castle. It doesn't matter that Krinitz was fifty when she made this, for it is a picture of what the child still alive in her left behind. 

This is the picture of home that is fundamental to personality and to character, the image that each of us harbors at some level. The top portion is linear and structured; the bottom is curvaceous and flowing. The whole is both stable and relaxed. The naive image has little artifice and an abundance of unfiltered, joyous expression.

During the 1970s, Krinitz originally made several pieces with subject matter like this, drawn from pre-war memories of Polish village life, where Jews and Gentiles lived side-by-side. She records memories of matzoh-making, of walking to holiday ceremonies on stilts that her brother made: The pleasure of simple, pre-industrial, pre-electrical, agricultural life ordered by the combination of seasonal and religious community observations. 

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, The Bees Save Me, 1996. Art and Remembrance.

After a long hiatus, Krinitz returned to her project in the 1990s, finally moving into the darkening story of her early adolescence and the arrival of the Nazis. Several of the Krinitz textiles show the indignities of Nazi sadism. She depicts soldiers cutting the beard off her grandfather; arousing the family in their nightclothes at gunpoint while neighbors gawked; marching Jewish boys off to forced labor where they were shot when depleted; and, finally, rounding up the Jews from among their neighbors for transport to death camps. 

Esther and her thirteen year old sister fled (the rest of the family was killed). They survived by speaking only Polish and pretending they knew no German (closely related to their native Yiddish). They disguised themselves to find work for an elderly couple in a nearby village. In the scene above, Esther works in the garden that the old man to allowed her to plant. One day Nazis came and tried to question her. She explains in the embroidered caption: 

"June 1943 in Grabowka. While I was tending the garden I had planted, two Nazi soldiers appeared and began to talk to me. I couldn't let them know that I understood them, so I just shook my head as they spoke. Dziadek, the old farmer who had taken me in as his housekeeper, came to stand watch near by, but the honey bees rescued me first, suddenly swarming around the soldiers. "Why aren't they stinging you?" the soldiers asked Dziadek as they ran out of the garden."

Take away the rifles, take away the caption, and what distinguishes these two scenes, made almost twenty years apart, first when the artist was 50 and then approaching 70? 

The first, the pre-war memory, is quite specific—each of the five siblings is located, the house is recalled in loving detail—yet it is mythic too. It is an undatable memory of golden childhood. Esther's memory could be of life at four or fourteen. It is a recollection of well-being, innocence, stability, and love—a memory of place as feeling. Many adults recall such an idyll of childhood. But few recall the idyll's interruption by such sudden and complete trauma as Krinitz was to experience.

The pre-war scene is actually a tapestry. Every bit of the linen is covered with crewel embroidery so that the surface is entirely worked with stitches. Every inch of the surface has been touched and transformed by the artist's hand. The ideas of caressing and modeling come with this. It's not only a scene she recalls, but one she has invented as well—one she has caused to appear, and to appear just as she wants to remember it. She is its author. 

The picture of her as an adolescent—no longer a girl, shoved into untimely adulthood—is not a tapestry. The sky, the "earth" of the garden and some other areas are simple fabric underpinning. The plants in the garden have been sewn in place by embroidery or appliqué; the bees, the flowers, the details of the figures, but the surface has not been as carefully stroked. In contrast to the first picture, it is entirely lined up. The importance of order at this stage in the girl's life was paramount. Even the bees on their hives rest in lines. Krinitz has made up this scene too. She has authored this scene not to refresh herself, but as a way to diffuse trauma.

More of the artist's time and attention have gone into a substantial narrative below the image the explains what might otherwise elude the viewer. She interprets the picture for us to be sure we know what she felt and how Nature continued to aid her.

The second image is remarkable for the way a survivor of great trauma pictures herself coping. The human figures—both the good and bad ones—remain small in the largely natural scene. She is located off to the side. She seems to mediate her own feelings of fear by spreading all possible feeling through the natural landscape, like healing wounds with resort to the earth. Even the bees, massing around the hives and buzzing around the soldiers, appear insignificant in the grand scheme of the picture. Krinitz controls her panic and fear by telling the story, controlling the context and perspective, and placing herself in a large framework.

Esther Nisehnthal Krinitz, Ordered to Leave Our Homes, 1993.
Embroidery and fabric collage. Art and Remembrance.

"This was my family on the morning of October 15, 1942. We were ordered by the Gestapo to leave our homes by 10 a.m. to join all the other Jews on the road to Crasnik railroad station and then to their death." 

This wall hanging, in narrative sequence previous to the one above, pictures Esther's recollection of the day her family had to face their impending deportation to the camps. This is a family portrait, undiluted by the presence of their killers. This was the day that Esther and her sister, in red, would flee. 

Of the thirty-six pieces Krinitz made, this is one of the least dense in terms of sewing. The fabric background is largely plain cloth with a few large swathes of appliqué. Huge crows hunch on the housetop, symbols of impending death for the black-clad quintet.Two outsized sunflowers bloom for the escaping girls in their red capes.

Dark colors signify the grievous content of this picture but its momentous content is signaled by the size and forthright positioning of the family and the house. Nature does not soften or disguise emotion; if anything, it underscores the tragedy. Krinitz does not caress or decorate this image with thousands of strokes of her needle. In terms of presenting the most traumatic event of her life—a moment where she could be emotionally frozen forever—she is if brief, still heroically direct. In naive art, to place the figures near the bottom of the picture is to locate them in the most important place. It's to ground them, as children do in crayon drawings. This is the drawing that stays forever on the parents' wall, the treasured picture of the family, drawn by the daughter with a heart full of love. From this instant forward, Esther would be her own mother and her sister's. In her seventies, mother and child, she recounts the story of how this came to be. 

Esther Nisenthal Krinitz, Granddaughter, 1999. Embroidery and fabric collage.
Art and Remembrance.

The final image in both the series and this show pictures a little girl who raises her arm to examine the trunk of a stout tree in a beautiful garden. The lawn, the bark, the flowers, the girl's hair—all are elaborately embroidered. They are touched all over with a loving, lingering hand. Krinitz has brought her story sequentially through the war years and her visit to the camp where her family was killed, a harrowing scene even in naif stitchery. She details and names the piles of ashes, the gas chambers, the burnt down home of the camp director. Aside from the girl's pigtails and dress, there is nothing bright in the meticulously catalogued scene.

In this final scene, she has lived a long life in Brooklyn with her husband whom she met in a refugee camp, with her daughters, and now celebrates her granddaughter, joyous in nature. There is an attempt at observational representation her; she has moved beyond the grip of memory and the burden of interpretation into a real and safe present. The girl is little and the tree next to her is really enormous; there is actual scale and it feels reassuring. The border is green, the text is white: "When you were three years old dear Mami Sheine, Grandma came to visit you. We went to a park where you discovered a huge tree. I never forgot the expression on your face as you stood there admiring the tree. Grandma loves you so much." 

Grandma is free and insures that she will be part of another little girl's strength, no matter what comes.

"Catherine Opie: Portraits and Landscapes" at the Wexner Center for the Arts

I think that Thomas Edison has already been installed to replace William Allen as an icon of Ohio in the Capitol's Statuary Hall. Had I only known that ours is Catherine Opie's home state, I'd have done something to see her enshrined instead next to James Garfield as the a representative of Ohio's glory. Move over, second-tier presidents, when we have artists of true stature and vision.

Catherine Opie, Miranda, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist  and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 Catherine Opie, Miranda, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist

 and Regen Projects, Los Angeles 

Certainly Opie's photographs in Portraits and Landscapes, showing at the Wexner Center in Columbus until August 2, would be at home in the proudest marble and columned traditional setting. If we were in the 17th century galleries of a great European museum, surely our feelings would be much like the ones we experience as we move at considered pace through this show.

Each of Opie's sitters appears before a background of profound, impenetrable black. Whether we register that as a blankness or as infinite depth, the effect is in either case the same. It places the subject in a timeless  three-dimensional space entirely his or her own, unrelated to any other place or moment.

The effect is to sculpt the figure out of this medium of black. The light not only defines the subject's features, emphasizing some over others, but frees the form from the darkness as sculptures are said to free figures from great pieces of stone. So, through two galleries of portraits, each figure is captured at a second birth, born not of flesh, but of mind, effort, and imagination These are individuals sprung like Athena from Zeus's head, fully grown and mature. ( An interesting comparison can be made at http://www.modigliani-drawings.com/nude%20in%20profile.htm .)

In her portrait, Miranda wears a gown of almost Quakerish simplicity and understatement. Its claret color and her red hair mediate between blackness and the luminous skin and blue eyes that shine from her steady, resolute expression. Beauty can be a poisoned gift. Here, beauty is neither disguised nor avoided; its possessor can carry the weight with chin slightly lifted, directly returning the viewer's gaze. The image portrays the strength, stature, and balance of a flawlessly beautiful woman with nothing—not even her perfect face—to hide.

Miranda, a three-quarter standing portrait of a woman of noble bearing, is clearly related to a long tradition of Western portraiture, evident in any museum one cares to visit. While this particular woman captivates us with her seriousness and beauty, we also know that, individual, her photographer places her among a class of persons demanding our highest respect. The setting, the attention to details, the lighting all tell us so. Do we really need to know who she is? Here is a distinguished individual who is also a participant in the centuries-old tradition of women posed for posterity. She is one; she is another one.

When we visit museum galleries hung with grand and stirring portraits of Renaissance, Enlightenment, or nineteenth century royalty, clergy, poets, and concubines, how often do we know who those portrayed persons were, or what they accomplished in the world? Certainly not as often as we'd like. King George? Henry? And what number? Not a clue! Yet we interpret the images through our understanding, general knowledge, and imaginations via the art itself, through conventions and deviations from them; from our own reactions to images of luxury, eccentricity, and beauty. We react to the story the artist has told and we create the central figure to satisfy our use of the painting. Ahistorical? Anachronistic? Yes. Utterly commonplace? Yes again.

In fact, we do the same thing with contemporary portraits simply because we don't know everyone who is thought to be important to image-makers. Nor are we supposed to. In this series of portraits, Opie identifies her subjects by first names only. How they were posed appears to have been largely up to the artist, who received lovely testimonials from many of her subjects for the generous or enlightening experiences they had with her. As recounted in gallery notes, the artist Kara Walker remarked that before many scheduled portrait sessions, she has been less than at her best: "There are a handful of images by well-known artists out there of me at my darkest, lowest points. Cathy's manner and the resultant images show me feeling cool, collected, showing my muscles…I felt a rush of ownership or at least fellowship—that we were going to endeavor to correct this past."

Catherine Opie, Mary, 2013. Pigment print, 50 x 38.4. ©Catherine Opie.  Image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

So, yes, Opie's subjects are eminent people, contemporary artists working in the avant garde of visual arts, literature, performance, and music. Even though many will be recognized by a relatively small audience, they are nonetheless constantly imaged. Miranda, above, is the filmmaker/performance artist/writer/actor Miranda July. If you haven't seen her before, just Google for her image: There are pages of them. It's a worthwhile exercise in understanding the difference between a picture and a portrait.

In the present day, pictures are everywhere by accident and by design. The tradition of grand portraits in which Opie places this series derives from times in which images of the great were rare and precious. A painted portrait of Voltaire would become the basis for engravings, which could be printed and disseminated at low cost. But the world was not saturated by an infinite flow of unique images of a single eminent person who was redecorated and whose personality was recast daily. There was a constancy about the central identities of intellectuals and artists.These portraits, in this form, reclaim that idea of constancy. 

To the extent that Opie's portraits help define and settle identities, she uses visual tradition as a structure upon which she arranges the ideas, works, and core identities of the individuals portrayed. The black background, the exquisitely controlled lighting, the dignity of the posing, the shapes of the portraits: These form the traditional framework that assure a place of honor. Within that framework, the individual is exactly as portrayed—nude or clothed; regal or workmanly; facing forward or back to us; looking into the distance, or daring us to return a gimlet gaze.

Catherine Opie, Idexa, 2012. Pigment print, 50 x 38.4. ©Catherine Opie.  Image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

While Miranda's classicism provides studied definition to a woman whose image is ubiquitous and casually broadcast, in Mary and Idexa,  Opie uses conventions to bring the temperature of uncommon images down. Tradition soothes expectations and we are eased into accepting the differences in purpose and outlook revealed in these portraits. Formality does not stifle outrage, but it is a leveler; it brings discussion back to a home base.The women depicted here are not women with traditional self-awareness or lives. But who they are and who they wish to reveal are who we will see in the same dignified ways we would see queens and saints and famous lovers portrayed. 

These two portraits will hang comfortably in haughty halls centuries hence, among the late Maries and Georges and Voltaires; the images will command respect beyond our period and, like all historical images, will require the acts of research and imagination that we are asked to give to the past from our own present. The question cries out: Can we understand the genius of difference in our own time with the acceptance we grant to heroes of the past? Can we imaginatively condense the years it takes gradually to achieve understanding through the mediation of formal visual traditions?

Catherine Opie, Untitled #5, 2012. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles

 Catherine Opie, Untitled #5, 2012. Pigment print, 40 x 60 in. ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects, Los Angeles 

The Portraits in Opie's show are so intense, so detailed and personal that the curator, Bill Horrigan, made the interesting decision to divide the portraits into groups of three or four separated with single, large scale landscapes the artist's. Some of these, like the one above, I am sorry to feel obliged to call a landscape, as I think it is so very open to—so inviting of—free interpretation. But their use is fascinating, contrasting as they do with the entirely unfocused with portraits in which every detail is in sharp focus. Neither is realistic, of course. But the effort the portraits compel from the viewer, with a degree of focus that only incites us to come ever closer—sends one into the landscapes as if suddenly lifted out of stress and sent into cool reverie. It is both relaxing and disorienting, for there is no middle between the two photographic approaches. I like this arrangement better in the first floor gallery, which is larger than the narrow upstairs room. With lots of room to stand back and to take in a whole long wall, the effect of the combination is lovely and its meaning is clear. The closer one is to the works, upstairs, the harder the effectiveness of the contrast is to grasp.

If there is any problem with this show, it's that any single work in it could stand alone as a show in itself. It's an embarrassment of riches to be sure. The portraits are of a size and degree of detail that each is a map of the world, a voyage out far beyond anything you can notice at the outset. Every well-crafted detail is surrounded by a field of more and more subtle and revealing manipulations of Opie's medium. They are captivating and fulfilling—and absurd to present in miniature, in a blog. Don't miss a chance to see them.

Catherine Opie, Hamza, 2013. Pigment print, 33 x 25 in.  ©Catherine Opie, image courtesy the artist and Regen Projects,  Los Angeles

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.

 _________________________________________________________________
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