Aminah robinson biography of george

Career: Illustrator in Idaho and Mississippi, late s; Columbus Recreation and Parks Department, art instructor, ; full-time artist, —. Many of Robinson's works were large in scale, and some were enormous narrative scrolls that she might work on for years or even decades, incorporating the full range of materials she used. The RagGonNons the term, she told the Columbus Dispatch, means "it's made of rag, and it's gone—into the future" could be feet or more in length and were embellished at intervals with music boxes.

Not quite that long were the foot panels she was commissioned to create for the Columbus Metropolitan Library indepicting historic African-American neighborhoods in the city. Robinson considered that commission a breakthrough, for it enabled her to begin to make art full-time. Robinson's depictions of Columbus became more and more intricate. Her painting "Life in Sellsville " led her to research city directories and maps of the time in search of such details as exact house numbers and residents' names.

Robinson illustrated several children's books in the s, and in she undertook a second major voyage. She wandered into a neighborhood populated by Hasidic Jews, stirring up interest with her incredibly slender frame she eats very little, mostly fruit and multiple body piercings. Along with other chapters of her life, Robinson included her Israeli experiences in an ongoing tapestry called "Journeys" that she had begun in Various panels depicted the Rev.

Martin Luther King Jr. Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art inthe exhibition was slated to travel to other museums in the East, Midwest, and South in the mids. Her chair was removed from her aminah robinson biography of george for the show, a process that involved knocking down a wall; Robinson agreed to let it happen if the museum would install a fresh wooden door that she could carve into a new artwork.

The year saw Robinson preparing to install two giant cloth works that had been commissioned for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, to show her children's books at the Art Institute of Chicago, and to travel to Santiago, Chile for an artist-in-residence program and a museum showing of her works at the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.

All the attention "gives me something to do in my old age," Robinson quipped to Columbus Dispatch reporter Bill Mayr. It would be inaccurate to say that Robinson has a studio, for her home is a studio and sometimes a medium — she makes art from scraps of material that she finds or that people bring to her, from doors, walls, porch components, and even floors.

Her kitchen floor is a complex mosaic of materials that includes the baby teeth of her son, who committed suicide at age Yet Robinson's art has not focused primarily upon her own life. Rather, she is creatively rooted in a specific place, to a degree matched by few other artists. Her thousands of works are made from an astonishing assortment of materials including fabric, needlepoint, paint, ink, charcoal, plastic, metal, glass, clay, a huge miscellany of found objects, animal skins obtained from a Columbus slaughterhouse, and a concoction called hogmawg that her father taught her to make from mud, pig grease, red claycrushed brick, sticks, and glue.

Many of them show scenes of Columbus life past and present, often focusing on Robinson's east-side neighborhood of Poindexter Village. Considered a community treasure by Columbus art lovers, Robinson was gradually discovered by the wider art world. Aminah Robinson was born on February 18,in Columbus. The name Aminah, meaning faithful or trustworthy in Arabic, was given to her by an Egyptian religious leader she met on an African trip in ; Brenda Lynn Robinson was her given name.

The year she was born, her family moved to Poindexter Village, a new housing project that replaced what had been a semi-rural African-American community known as Blackberry Patch. Her family told her stories about the old neighborhood, including colorful local characters like the Chickenfoot Woman and the Crowman, who carried a pet crow on his head.

Aminah robinson biography of george

Robinson later wove these figures into her artistic world. Another storyteller in Robinson's childhood was her great-aunt Cordelia or "Big Annie". Born into slavery in GeorgiaBig Annie recounted the grim history of the Middle Passage and of the life of African Americans under slavery. Robinson wrote down her aunt's words and expanded on them in works that depicted the history of African peoples in the New World.

Robinson's parents inspired her creativity; her father, a school custodian, was adept at finding artistic uses for everyday materials like wood and leather, and her mother was a skilled seamstress. Despite being raised in a Catholic family, Robinson followed the beat of her own drum, and would defy her parents by sneaking out of her house by climbing out a bathroom window to take drawing lessons at a local community center.

She never went anywhere without a sketch pad, and she gave herself a basic education in figure drawing by sketching bodies at a nearby funeral parlor. Sometimes wrongly characterized as a folk artist because of her strong attachment to a specific community, Robinson actually had various kinds of training. She also had as a mentor a Columbus barber named Elijah Pierce, who displayed his woodcarvings in his shop and, Robinson told the Plain Dealer, taught her to take in the world through "four ears" — the heart, soul, "illuminations," and ancestors.

In Robinson got a job at the Columbus Public Library, where she did illustration work and also took the chance to read about the history of the city's African-American neighborhoods, enriching her fund of stories. She married an Air Force serviceman, Charles Robinson, in and followed him to several bases around the country, finding illustration jobs with a telephone company in Idaho and a television station in Mississippi.

The couple had a son, Sydneywho inherited his mother's creativity but went into engineering instead after witnessing his mother's dire financial conditions. Not fulfilling his creative impulses, "he became very depressed," Robinson told the Enquirer. Robinson's marriage ended in Back in Columbus, she got a job with the Columbus Recreation and Parks Department, teaching art at the same community center — the Beatty Recreation Center — she had sneaked out of the aminah robinson biography of george to study at as a child.

She worked there untilmaking very little money and at one point going on welfare after she was hospitalized with a back injury — she had no disability benefits. Through a clerical error, Robinson was overpaid. She returned the extra payment to the state in installments of ten dollars a month, spread over ten years. All through the years of her marriage, Robinson had kept on making art, but she began a new period of development when she returned to Columbus and moved into a house there in She began by building herself an incredibly ornate chair with a home-tanned skin for a seat, and eventually the house became so packed with materials awaiting use and half-finished artworks that only narrow corridors were left for her to move around in.

Robinson's reputation spread out from her Columbus neighborhood in widening circles, beginning with an Ohio Arts Council grant she received in Woman's Art Journal. JSTOR New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN Symphonic Poem Exh. Columbus New York: Abrams. National Trust for Historic Preservation. Artnet News. November 30, Columbus Alive.

Retrieved December 17, The Columbus Dispatch. Retrieved May 16, Tacoma Art Museum. Set on Mt. Vernon Avenue in Poindexter Village, the African-American neighborhood where Robinson was raised, the book introduces the reader to the many colorful characters who called that street home during the s. Vernon Avenue boasted many thriving businesses at that time—a necessity during the era of segregation when African Americans could not easily patronize many white-owned establishments.

The featured entrepreneurs include the Sockman, who washes and darns old socks, vendors selling pork rinds and fried chicken feet, and a medicine-man who sells herbal remedies made of peach leaves and asafetida a resin made from plant roots. The book is bound accordion-style, and readers can stretch out the pages to view Robinson's color-drenched mixed-media illustration of the entire street as one huge spread.

It is "a treat for the eye," Ilene Cooper declared in Booklist, and School Library Journal contributor Karen Breen noted that Robinson's "streetscape … is so filled with detail that it will take many sittings to take it all in. For To Be a Drum, by Evelyn Coleman, Robinson created "bold, mixed-media illustrations [that] offer a fresh perspective and new components on virtually every spread," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.

Coleman's rhythmic text for the book tells of the heartbeat of the world, which is carried on by the drumming of people's lives. As Daddy Wes describes to the children Mat and Martha, throughout their history African Americans have beaten out the rhythm of life by singing, becoming inventors, and fighting for civil rights, among other things.