'Creation Story' Evolves On Fabric

Artist tells nearly forgotten past in distinctive process

By Dorothy Shinn
Beacon Journal art & architecture critic

Today, many of us will sit glued to our TV sets as we wait to see on whom the Oscars will be bestowed, and to which among all the stories told the golden statue will be awarded.

We all have stories, some from our childhood, some from adulthood and some from our old age. Many of them are even good enough to write down. But not all of us have the focus and talent to make those stories into works of art, nor do we all realize that stories don't always get told in books or at the movies.

Sometimes stories get told in paint, line and figure. And sometimes stories, magnificent stories, get told in the unique and unmatched way one individual puts odd, old and unconventional materials together.

The Akron Art Museum is displaying the work of such a talent in an exhibit that reveals the focus, energy and sense of mission needed to compose memories into incredible, three-dimensional, multimedia narratives that have thrilled art lovers since the early 1980s.

Through April 5, the museum is exhibiting Along Water Street: New Work by Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, a mixed-media ''creation story'' pieced together from 1984 to 2007, based on tales she'd heard from her Uncle Alvin from the time she could first remember (at age 3 in 1943) until his death in 1990.

Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, the exhibit reflects Robinson's memories of now-lost neighborhoods in Columbus along the Scioto River, as well as the universal themes of migration, community and family reminiscences.

She has stitched these stories together with others and her own belief in evolution, using her distinctive layering process, combining rags, buttons, shells and other found objects with her own drawings and paintings on handmade paper.

The Akron Art Museum, the site of Robinson's first solo museum show in 1987, is the first stop on the four-museum tour (all in Ohio) of this exhibit, which consists of 12 rag paintings, one watercolor and a form unique to Robinson that she calls ''RagGonNon,'' or artwork that just ''keeps on ragging on and on.''

The RagGonNon in this exhibit is a 60-foot-long cloth and mixed-media work encrusted with buttons, beads, men's ties, sashes and scarves, handmade dolls and spirit packets, and at least one long skinny item that closely resembles a shed snakeskin.

These pieces take years to research, assemble and create, because they continue to evolve in response to others' responses to them. This particular RagGonNon began in 1984 and expresses themes of creation, discovery, acceptance and community.

The exhibit reconstructs the history of the largely forgotten Columbus neighborhood called Water Street.

Uncle Alvin was Alvin Frederick Zimmerman, Aminah's mother's oldest sibling and only brother. His memories were in turn based on the stories he heard from his great-uncle Bill Taylor, who owned a bait shop on Water Street in an area that is now in the heart of downtown Columbus.

This area along the Scioto River was inundated during the Flood of 1913, the same flood that destroyed the Ohio & Erie Canal, one of the worst natural disasters in Ohio's history.

''In 1938, Water Street was renamed Marconi Boulevard, and after that the Water Street community was completely forgotten,'' said Allison Tillinger Schmid, Akron Art Museum assistant curator.

''Uncle Alvin's stories are combined with stories she looked up in the Columbus Library, plus stories that are more urban folklore. Uncle Alvin told stories of Native Americans greeting Africans in the 1200s in a place called Chipo Village. She couldn't find any reference to that village existing in the Ohio Valley area, but she uses it anyway.

''She goes back and forth in time, using a technique called Sankofa, which means looking to the past in order to move forward.''

Robinson's RagGonNon has the mixture of observation and oral history similar to that found in the Bayeux Tapestry, where closely examined vignettes lie cheek by jowl with lavishly embroidered fancies. For Robinson, however, Water Street is no fancy, but a metaphor for the larger story of African-Americans migrating to and from the Ohio Valley.

Her memories, her knowledge of and loyalty to her community and appreciation of the past have driven her to record these stories in a way that causes all of us to want to listen, to remember, to put down and pass on our own stories.

That, of course, is only one aspect of our attraction to this work. Visitors interested in working with fabric have been particularly responsive to this exhibit, as have those who are intrigued by artworks made up of unconventional materials.

The watercolor and the rag paintings have been framed, whereas the RagGonNon has been ''skied,'' hung in one continuous course above them.

Just as there are many layers of materials, methods and perspectives in her work, there are many ways of appreciating it.

Students from Akron's Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts, for instance, have borrowed Robinson's RagGonNon format to create their own project, One South High: Collaborative Works by Miller South Students Inspired by the Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, which is on display in the Akron museum's Mary S. and David C. Corbin Foundation Gallery through March 22.

These youngsters and others who want to discuss Robinson's work will be able to do so in person when she gives a free lecture from 2 to 3 p.m. March 22 at the museum, along with the Columbus Museum of Art's Carole Genshaft and the Akron museum's Barbara Tannenbaum.

In an interview last year with Genshaft, Robinson explained the RagGonNon in this show.

''The white cloth with stitching that begins this RagGonNon is a Memory Map that has not yet been fully designed, but the voices are beginning to take shape, crossing all the boundaries of the universe,'' Robinson said. ''The voices of humanity are being shaped by God. I have tried to show the migratory flux of people going back and forth in time and the evolution of these communities.

''I show the people nestled in the Ohio Valley peering out as if to reach out to a new dawn, a new beginning.

''It is also about the system of Black Laws that made African-Americans invisible, even though we helped to build the country. . . . I have also included the Farmlands, Mount Vernon Avenue and the communities. From all these places, the ancestors' voices emerge, and they are still emerging.''

In addition to the extensive amount of work that focuses on Columbus, Robinson has created other narrative series based on the people and places she has visited, such as her residencies in Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, Israel and Chile, and more recently, Italy and Peru.

Her work reflects not only the formal training she received at the Columbus Art School (now the Columbus College of Art and Design), but also the traditional skills — papermaking, needlework — passed down to her by the elders of her family.

Robinson was a 2004 recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, the so-called Genius Grant. The Columbus Museum of Art is developing a permanent center devoted to the study of her work.

Western Reserve PBS, in collaboration with the Akron Art Museum, has produced a documentary about Robinson that includes insightful interviews with the artist, who talks about the stories and experiences behind her works, as well as the teachers and students who created the Miller South project.

The program is available at http://www.westernreservepublicmedia.org and is being played continuously in the Akron museum's video box, along with a video on photographer Edward Weston.

''One's life does not begin with oneself,'' Robinson says at the beginning of her video. ''I stand on their shoulders, their stories, their gifts, and they allow me to continue the work.''

---

Dorothy Shinn writes about art and architecture for the Akron Beacon Journal. Send information to her at the Akron Beacon Journal, P.O. Box 640, Akron, OH 44309-0640 or dtgshinn@neo.rr.com.

Taken From Ohio.com