I find myself creating disobedient objects including prints and ceramics that help me to understand historical memory and to find a place in it for voices that might otherwise be silenced. Audre Lorde once said “We’ve been taught that silence would save us, but it won’t”. Growing up in a culture where to be gay is anathema, I was hungry for reflections of people like myself. So, I make queer little objects, and collections of artifacts; leaving traces of lives that might break through the silence of history and cultural erasure.
Interview with Andrew Robinson, by Beatrice Helman, curated by Shannon Goff and Roxanne Jackson, Los Angeles, Maake Magazine, Issue 8, Clay Edition, 2018
Conversations about art and work
- A conversation about art and work in and out of the studio with Andrew and Paddy Johnson, Netvvrk, New York, NY, 2023
- Andrew Cornell Robinson interviewed on The Large Glass, Annandale, NJ, 2022
- Andrew Cornell Robinson Studio Interview, Equity Gallery, New York, NY, 2020
- Interview with Andrew Robinson, by Beatrice Helman, curated by Shannon Goff and Roxanne Jackson. Maake Magazine, Issue 8, Clay Edition, Los Angeles, CA, 2018
- Transgressing Across Time and Line, by Etty Yaniv, Art Spiel, 2018
- Create Or Else, interview, Edward Albee Foundation, Ogilvy, October 2010
- More
I was a gawky little dyslexic kid on the free lunch program riding the short bus to school each morning, along with my fellow classmates; a motley crew of misfits, head-cases, and the mentally disabled. Expectations were low. I had a teacher who got a “Learning to Read Through the Arts” grant to build a dark room and invite an artist from the city to teach us how to shoot, develop and hand color black and white photographs. We learned to read by writing stories about those photographs. It was the first time that reading made sense to me, because it began with making an image.
At the conclusion of that year, this group of oddball children was corralled onto a bus to visit the Guggenheim Museum. We walked into the lobby and I looked up to see that wild spiral, and up the ramp we went, past the Joseph Beuys retrospective. I think it was 1979. His work was a revelation – Huge blocks of lard, felt, vitrines, chalkboards covered in cryptic writing and drawings. I really freaked out. It was amazing. Then, at the top of the spiral we were confronted by a display of all of the photographs my classmates and I had made. This educational program did a lot to build up a group of kids who had been written off by most of the adults in our lives. I am forever grateful for that experience. It planted a seed that led to my life long creative pursuits
Transgressing Across Time and Line, by Etty Yaniv, Art Spiel, 2018
Be Salted, Not Sugared.
Anonymous, graffiti, Paris, France May 1968