More than the a long time, Robinson developed a bespoke vocabulary for her tasks. A single central thought in her get the job done was “RagGonNon,” the at times monumental mixed-media items that would “rag on and on” in excess of time, as she encrusted them with beads, thread and even, say, shells, to talk an abiding spiritual connection to Black background and identification.
Her “Water Road (The Legend of Chipo Village)” RagGonNon, a 60-foot-extensive piece that was proven at the Akron Art Museum in 2011, took almost 25 several years to entire. It depicts African-People in america likely about their daily lives on H2o Avenue, a avenue in downtown Columbus that she acquired about from an uncle. When that avenue later turned Marconi Boulevard, Robinson wished to capture the importance of the lives lived there that had been paved around.
The piece requires on a mystical excellent, starting off with a panel that, in stitched lettering, reads “In the Beginning” in advance of the eye is directed to an embroidered map intended to symbolize the community’s connections to its ancestral earlier. Robinson layered material, snakeskin and countless numbers of buttons to make the bodies of the figures she depicted appear to be to increase up out of the piece.
“She suggests she was grounded in the African concept of sankofa,” Carole Genshaft, curator at huge of the Columbus Museum of Artwork, explained in a phone job interview. Sankofa, a term in the Akan language of Ghana, about implies “Go back again and get it.”
“I consider that accounts for substantially of her enthusiasm to do parts that bundled Africa,” Genshaft reported, “before enslavement, the center passage, enslavement, emancipation and migration.”
In Shepard, her Columbus neighborhood, Robinson was a beloved, if to some degree eccentric, determine, while her prolific portfolio took her to galleries and museums across the nation and all-around the environment. In a 2006 assessment of a exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, the New York Times artwork critic Grace Glueck explained the exhibit “Symphonic Poem: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson” as almost overflowing its galleries.
“The nearly 100 parts,” Glueck wrote, “include scroll-like publications unrolling for far more than 40 feet and a cluster of totemic sculptures with created-in songs containers ranging from 8 to 10 ft high.”