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Family stories come to life in star artist’s paintings

Aminah Robinson’s 'Along Water Street' at Springfield Museum of Art through Nov. 29

“Life Along Water Street,” 2000-07.

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Aminah Robinson

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Aminah Robinson, “The Storyteller: Alvin Frederick Zimmerman (Uncle Alvin),” 1989 (cloth, thread, pen and ink, watercolor and gold paint on paper).

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"Church Quilters on Water Street," from the collection of the Ohio Supreme Court.

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By Andrew McGinn, Staff Writer 5:10 PM Friday, October 16, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — It’s a nice metaphor — that a group of African explorers made it to central Ohio thousands of years before any white European got there, only to settle in the exact spot where a public-housing complex was built in modern-day Columbus.

Only when Aminah Robinson explains it, she’s not speaking metaphorically.

It’s what she learned growing up from her uncle, who learned it from his great uncle.

“That’s what he said,” Robinson said, “and somehow, I’m inclined to believe him.”

After all, you know what they say about stories — even the craziest myths often have a shred of truth to them.

And Robinson hopes her Uncle Alvin will be proven right in her lifetime.

Stranger things have happened.

“I didn’t think we’d have an African-American president in my time, either,” she said.

Until then, the Columbus artist will honor her family’s stories through her work — “Along Water Street,” which opens Saturday, Oct. 17, at the Springfield Museum of Art, features recent work inspired by a half-century of Uncle Alvin’s stories.

“He’d just sit there for hours and tell these stories,” Robinson said. “He wasn’t playing. He was very serious. He wanted me to write a lot of this stuff down. I promised him I’d do the best I could with them.”

Promise kept.

Almost 20 years after Alvin Frederick Zimmerman’s death, “Along Water Street” debuted at the Columbus Museum of Art in 2007.

The show then proceeded to tour the state. (Springfield is its final destination.)

The show features Robinson’s rag paintings — paintings embellished with cloth — plus one of her self-termed RagGonNon works, a 60-foot-long cloth that, like oral history itself, is never finished.

“These were stories that were given to me,” she said.

She listened to Uncle Alvin’s stories from the time she was 3, in 1943, to his death in 1990.

“He gave me the stories of not only the community he was born into,” she said, “but also the landscape of the ancient land of the Ohio Valley.”

The name of the show comes from Water Street in present-day downtown Columbus, once the home of Uncle Alvin’s great uncle, Bill Taylor.

In fact, many people made their homes there along the Scioto River until the flood of 1913 decimated everything.

When Columbus later changed the street’s name to Marconi Boulevard, it all but ensured that any memory of the Water Street community would be lost to time.

“People had a life. A culture,” Robinson said. “They helped make us who we are today.”

So, hey, it’s maybe entirely possible that African explorers lived among the native peoples of central Ohio in something called Chipo Village — which eventually, through time and the magic of a metropolitan housing authority, became Poindexter Village, the housing complex Robinson called home as a girl.

“Those that stayed founded the community which is today Poindexter Village,” she said. “So it’s one long memory. We just call it different communities every time we topple one.”

One thing here is not open to debate — Robinson is a star in the contemporary art world.

“There’s this balance of sophistication and this respect for the very personal traditions handed down by family,” said Carole Genshaft, who curated the “Water Street” show for the Columbus museum.

As part of a renovation project, the Columbus museum is slated to open the Aminah Robinson Center — a permanent wing devoted to the study of her work — in 2012.

“We have this wonderful opportunity to highlight the work of an artist who’s become nationally known and is a Columbus treasure,” Genshaft said.

The museum already launched a Web site, “Aminah’s World,” in 2008.

It’s a fitting name for an artist who, besides the African village thing, has invented whole new words to describe her work (she makes sculptures with a concoction involving mud, leaves and pig grease called “hogmawg”) and works daily from 4 a.m. to midnight.

No joke.

She doesn’t even own a bed. Just a couch.

“Some artists,” Robinson said, “go all through life not being understood. I take it as a blessing. I don’t take it for granted.”

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0352 or amcginn@coxohio.com.