Aminah Robinson's Hundred-and-Eighteen-Foot Memory
Near Columbus, Ohio
Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson was born on February eighteenth, nineteen forty, and grew up in Poindexter Village, a federally funded public housing project on Columbus's near east side. Her father made art from whatever was available. Her mother did needlework. Aminah absorbed both.
She developed her own materials, including a substance she called hogmawg, made from animal and plant matter mixed into a sculptural medium. She stitched, drew, painted, and carved. She built what she called RagGonNons, enormous textile pieces that rag on and on, weaving together ancestral memory, Black history, and community life. The largest RagGonNon she completed measured one hundred eighteen feet in length and weighed two hundred pounds.
The work traced a specific arc of history: from Angola, through the Middle Passage, through slavery, through emancipation and the Great Migration, into Columbus, into Poindexter Village, into the specific families and faces of the near east side. Robinson was not making abstract art. She was making a counter-archive for people whose histories had been incompletely kept elsewhere.
Her neighbor and mentor Elijah Pierce, the woodcarver on Long Street, told her to keep working and to trust what the ancestors gave her. She was a MacArthur Fellow in two thousand four. She gave her entire estate, including her home and everything in it, to the Columbus Museum of Art at her death in two thousand fifteen.
Most of Poindexter Village was demolished around two thousand thirteen. The neighborhood Robinson's art preserved for the record is largely gone. The art remains.
