1. Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson was an American artist who represented Black history through art.
26 Facts About Aminah Robinson
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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.
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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".
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On her trip to Africa in 1979, Robinson was christened with the name "Aminah" by an Egyptian cleric.
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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".
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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.
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In 1964, Aminah Robinson married Clarence Aminah Robinson, later separating in 1971.
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On May 22,2015, Aminah Robinson died of a heart complication.
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Aminah Robinson left all her belongings to the Columbus Museum of Art.