AKRON, OH.- Columbus, Ohio artist Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson has been creating elaborate mixed media paintings and sculptures for more than 50 years. Her most recent series, Along Water Street, produced between 2000 and 2007, will be on view at the Akron Art Museum January 31 – April 5, 2009. Organized by the Columbus Museum of Art, this exhibition reflects the landscape and culture of Columbus and the Ohio Valley, and, at the same time, presents universal themes about migration and settlement. The Akron Art Museum is honored to be the premiere tour venue for the exhibition, as it was the site of Aminah’s first solo museum show in 1987.

Aminah’s art is grounded in the African concept of Sankofa (or learning from the past in order to move forward) – the exhibition Along Water Street further reveals the importance of handed-down stories, conversations and memories as a means of strengthening perceptions of who we are and where we come from. Based on research and stories her Uncle Alvin told Aminah as she was growing up, this exhibition reconstructs the history of the largely forgotten community in Columbus called Water Street. Uncle Alvin was Alvin Fitzgerald Zimmerman, Aminah’s mother’s oldest sibling and only brother. His reminiscences are, 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, one of the worst natural disasters in Ohio’s history. For Aminah, Water Street is a metaphor for a larger story of the constant flow of African Americans to and from the Ohio Valley. The artist describes the series as “going back and forth in history,” including references to Uncle Alvin’s accounts of early Native American and African inhabitants who populated the area hundreds of years ago, as well as those who lived in more recent 19th and 20th century communities.

“Aminah’s work provides both a dazzling visual experience and a complex and layered examination of the bridges between past and present, myth and fact, the physical and the spiritual, the close at hand and the global,” said Carole Genshaft, exhibition curator and the Columbus Museum of Art’s adjunct curator of education. “Her grounding in her community and respect for the past has propelled her to preserve and share stories in a way that encourages all of us to listen, record, and pass on our own stories.”

Twelve “rag” paintings (works on paper), a portrait of Uncle Alvin and a 60-foot-long, cloth and mixed media RagGonNon comprise the exhibition. “RagGonNon” is Aminah’s term for an artwork in any form which is never finished but just “keeps ragging on and on.” A RagGonNon takes years to research and create, in part because it continues to evolve in response to others’ experiences of it. Encrusted with buttons, beads, handmade dolls and spirit packets, the RagGonNon featured in this exhibition, started in 1984, echoes the themes of creation, discovery, migration and community.

A 2004 MacArthur fellow, Aminah attended the Columbus School of Art (now the Columbus College of Art and Design) in the late 1950s. Her art has been widely exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in Columbus and throughout the United States. For more information about the artist, visit Columbus Museum of Art’s interactive website www.aminahsworld.org.

This exhibition was organized by the Columbus Museum of Art. Its presentation in Akron is made possible by a generous gift from The Folk Charitable Foundation.