ACA is showing Aminah Robinson: Bears Witness, booth 305 at pier 90, through Sunday.

March 6, 2020: ACA Galleries is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of work by Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson at The Armory Show on view from March 5 through March 8, 2020.   

While Robinson’s work celebrates human commonalities, it is also a cautionary tale about persistent racism and social injustice.  The artist’s work articulates childhood memories; the struggles and triumphs she knew as a single mother and black female artist; African American ancestral history from Africa, the Middle Passage, slavery in the American south, emancipation, and migration to the present; and her travels to Africa, the Middle East, and South America. In 2010, she summarized the purpose of more than six decades of work as “To celebrate the everyday lives of black people and their endurance through centuries of injustice.”   When Robinson died in 2015, she left her estate to the Columbus Museum of Art. The Museum has established an artist residency in Robinson’s home and will present a major solo exhibition and book, Raggin’ On: The Art of Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson’s House and Journals (July 10, 2020January 3, 2021).

On Saturday, March 7 from 11am to 12pm Carole Genshaft and Deidre Hamlar, curators at the Columbus Museum of Art, will discuss Robinson’s work—a reflection of art school training and handed-down traditions from her elders–and the passion that drove her to make art from the predawn hours to late at night each day.      MacArthur Award recipient Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940 – 2015) used both traditional and unconventional media and processes to create drawings, watercolors, button-beaded books and dolls, illustrated texts and journals, “hawgmog” sculpture, and rag paintings to celebrate cultural identities of African Americans.  

Since 1932 the American Contemporary Art Galleries (ACA) has been at the vanguard of American Art. As one of the oldest galleries in New York, its pioneering interest in progressive art was established early on in exhibitions, often introducing the work of artists Giorgio Cavallon, Aaron Douglas, Philip Evergood, Rockwell Kent, Alice Neel, Barnett Newman, Irene Rice Pereira, David Smith, Theodoros Stamos and Charles White, among many others.  Today, ACA Galleries continues to break new ground, supporting new artists, representing established artists and estates; and presenting several exhibitions per year that honor the gallery’s historical roots by re-imagining them in a contemporary context.

Armory Show Public Hours:
Thursday, March 5:    12 to 8pm
Friday, March 6:         12 to 8pm
Saturday, March 7:     12 to 7pm
Sunday, March 8:        12 to 6pm