CCAD alum Aminah Robinson featured in artnet

From a young age, Aminah Robinson wanted to be an artist. Beginning in her early childhood learning from her father, to her teen years taking Saturday Morning Art Classes at CCAD (then the Columbus Art School), Robinson’s seven-decade career in art saw her make work that took her from her home in a public housing project on Columbus’ Near East Side to Africa, Israel, and beyond.

The MacArthur genius grant recipient, who enrolled at Columbus College of Art & Design in 1957 and was later awarded an honorary master’s degree from the college, bequeathed her estate to CCAD’s neighbor, Columbus Museum of Art, upon her death at age 75 in 2015.

Now, after five years of preparations, the museum has embarked upon its first posthumous exhibition dedicated to Robinson: Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s House and Journals. The retrospective is on view Nov. 21, 2020–Oct. 3, 2021, was curated by Carole Genshaft and Deidre Hamlar, and includes Robinson’s artwork, journals, and personal possessions. 

Before her death, the MacArthur Foundation “recognized her as a folk artist who excelled in ‘celebrating themes of family, ancestry, and the grandeur of simple objects in drawings, paintings, and large-scale, mixed-media assemblages,’ reported artnet in a recent feature on the show. 

“For Robinson, the boundaries between art practice and everyday life were porous: each moment was another opportunity to record African American culture and transform lived experiences into works of art. She called her art “ ‘the missing pages of American history.’ ”

Read more about Raggin’ On in artnet and find more information about the exhibition on Columbus Museum of Art’s website.