Aminah Robinson was a consummate artist, storyteller, messenger, and historian, drawing from a deep well of personal experience. Timelessness of Life is a lively series of vignettes of Robinson’s African American neighborhood along Mt. Vernon Avenue in the artist’s native Columbus, Ohio. The painting’s technique and horizontal presentation reference her epic tapestries (called “ragonons”) and her traditional books and journals. The names, dates, and descriptive captions are critical to Robinson’s documentation of people, places, and events that have shaped her life and community, and to pass on that knowledge. “It’s about people,” she once said. “It’s about history.”
From a very young age, Robinson knew she wanted to be an artist. She attended what is now the Columbus College of Art and Design, located across the street from the Columbus Museum of Art and a few blocks from the barbershop of her mentor, the wood carver Elijah Pierce (1892–1984). In 2004 she was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Fellowship.