Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson was an American artist who represented Black history through art.
26 Facts About Aminah Robinson
2.
Aminah Robinson was raised within the close-knit community of Poindexter Village, one of the country's first federally funded metropolitan housing developments.
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Aminah Robinson was heavily inspired by her parents, Leroy Robinson and Helen Zimmerman-Robinson, who were both artists.
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Aminah Robinson's father encouraged her to draw from the age of 3 and gave her opportunities to learn about her history from elders in the community.
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Aminah Robinson insisted that she listen to music, read literature, and create art every day.
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Aminah Robinson's father taught her how to work with raw materials and scrap fabrics, specifically, the old-fashioned methods of rabbit-skin glue, and different coloured natural pigments.
7.
Aminah Robinson taught her his own creation of a mud-like substance called HawgMawg, a medium she often incorporates into her art.
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Aminah Robinson's mother taught her how to sew and weave.
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Aminah Robinson developed the habit of recording information through sketchbooks, journals and drawings to retain the information that fueled her work.
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Aminah Robinson created RagGonNon's, long pieces of fabric filled with diverse materials.
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Aminah Robinson produced art to record the missing pieces of Black history that were lost during slavery.
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Aminah Robinson's art is about the "African experience" of "racism and discrimination".
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Aminah Robinson transformed her ancestors' experiences of Black suffering and perseverance into art.
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Aminah Robinson's work centered around Sankofa: an African concept of retrieving information from history in order to make progress for the future.
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Aminah Robinson worked tirelessly on the civil rights movement in the 1950s and participated in the 1963 March on Washington that advocated for African American rights.
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Aminah Robinson included several diverse mediums into her work, including different fabrics, snakeskin, buttons, HowMawg and any commercial art supplies.
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Aminah Robinson used beads and shells to demonstrate the connection to Black history, and added music boxes into RagGonNons to bring them to life.
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Aminah Robinson took pride in her identity; Deidre Hamlar, the co-curator of Columbus Museum of Art said that "when most Black people [were] trying to assimilate and fit in, she definitely was not that person".
19.
On her trip to Africa in 1979, Robinson was christened with the name "Aminah" by an Egyptian cleric.
20.
Aminah Robinson changed her name legally to include the forename in 1980.
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Aminah Robinson worked day in and day out, she was "up with the sun, down late at night, sleeping only a few hours before starting again".
22.
In 1984, Aminah Robinson received the Ohio Governor's Award for the Visual Arts.
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Aminah Robinson's work has been displayed at the Columbus Museum of Art, the Tacoma Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum.
24.
In 1964, Aminah Robinson married Clarence Aminah Robinson, later separating in 1971.
25.
On May 22,2015, Aminah Robinson died of a heart complication.
26.
Aminah Robinson left all her belongings to the Columbus Museum of Art.