Spirit Door, which was originally part of the threshold between Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s kitchen and living room, blurs the line between functional object and artwork. Dressed in a brightly patterned red dress, Robinson’s carved and painted self-portrait looks out at the viewer from the right side of the door, her eyes bedazzled with sparkling green buttons. The artist’s carefully articulated hands—a trademark of her output—come together before her, the fingers almost touching, while a walking stick, which is topped with three empty Tropicana bottles, strengthens the verticality of the composition, drawing the viewer’s eyes upward and beyond the work. Around the figure, Robinson embedded dozens of objects—buttons, clothespins, plastic containers, and the like. What initially looks like a random assortment soon coalesces into a riot of tiny staring faces, their eyes composed of various gold-toned and enameled buttons. In a sly visual pun, twelve of the button-eyed faces conceal the movements to dismantled music boxes, their winding keys functioning as mouths, each of which “sings” a different tune. At once humorous and arresting, the faces, like the object itself, are simultaneously inviting and mildly forbidding. Like much of Robinson’s work, Spirit Door uses bright colors and humorous elements to convey intricately layered, often difficult, messages.

Robinson (1940-2015) was born and lived the entirety of her life in Columbus, Ohio. The artist grew up in Poindexter Village, one of the first federally funded housing projects in the country and a major center for African American culture in Ohio in the mid-20 th century. Her life and experiences in the tightly-knit community would feature prominently in her work, which often pays homage to the men and women who lived in the neighborhood. As a young adult, Robinson earned her BFA from the Columbus Art School (now the Columbus College of Art and Design). Though she left Ohio briefly to live with her husband on the various Air Force bases where he was stationed, she returned to the city with her young son after her marriage fell apart. Robinson’s life in the years following her return to Columbus in 1971 were marked by poverty and hardship, and at one point, the artist was forced to accept public assistance. During this period, she also met and formed a close relationship with self-taught carver Elijah Pierce that would have a lasting impact on Robinson.1 In 1974, Robinson moved into the home that would also serve as her art studio for the rest of her life. A few years later, friends and supporters in the Columbus arts community, including photographer Kojo Kuamau, helped raise funds for Robinson to travel to Africa—the first of numerous international study trips that would inform her work.2 By the mid- 1980s, Robinson’s work was awarded numerous grants and garnered increasing attention from galleries. Shortly after, she had her first solo museum exhibitions at the Akron Museum of Art in 1987 and the Columbus Museum of Art in 1990.

In spite of the challenges Robinson faced during her early career, Robinson made work for the entirety of her life, often relying on found objects—particularly textiles—and other non-traditional materials as her primary mediums, a tactic that simultaneously grew out of necessity and became a trademark of her work. Many of the materials the Robinson used, including dyes, were handmade, often using recipes passed down through her family. For instance, hogmawg, a cementlike substance with a dark brown, shiny finish, is a medium passed down to Robinson by her father and used throughout her oeuvre.3 In Spirit Door, the material is used to bind the various found objects to the wooden support of the door. Like Spirit Door, the majority of the artist’s works combine numerous mediums into finished objects. Her textile works, which she called RagGonNons, often incorporate painted and drawn elements, as well as buttons, beads, and other small objects, and are monumental in scale—an astonishing achievement given that Robinson worked primarily in her home. She also created numerous artists books and series of drawings and paintings, often in reaction to travel experiences during the latter part of her career.

Robinson’s work and practice are difficult to situate within the porous binary of vernacular (or self-taught) and mainstream art. In considering self-taught Black women artists, Lisa Farrington cites Paul and William Arnett’s definition of vernacular art as work that diverges from the “official languages of power”—as in, that of galleries, museums, and universities— “and reflects complex intercultural relationships charged with issues of race, class, region, and education.”4 Using Robinson as an example, Farrington notes, however, that the “languages of power” and those of vernacular art often share close similarities. Robinson’s studies at the Columbus Art School and her the trajectory of her career beginning in the mid-1980s distinguish her from artists typically associated with self-taught art, with whom she nevertheless shares certain stylistic and practical traits, which Farrington identifies as a “use of fabric, handmade paper, and other eclectic materials combined with her ‘non-academic inventiveness and casual handling of material.’”5 In this way, Robinson belongs to a long line of African American artists whose work is stylistically entangled with that of self-taught makers and whose ranks include William H. Johnson, Alison Saar, and Noah Purifoy. Like vernacular artists such as Nellie Mae Rowe, Robinson’s home studio also functioned as a type of art-environment and is now preserved as such by the Columbus Museum of Art.6 These traits make Robinson’s work a unique contribution to the national conversation about mainstream versus vernacular art and speak to the inadequacy of broad categories to capture the complexities and realities of artmaking.

Anastasia Kinigopoulo