Aminah Robinson:  Journeys Home, A Visual Memoir

February 1, 2025-July 13, 2025

Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940–2015) was an exceptionally prolific artist who used traditional and unconventional, non-traditional materials to create a staggering body of work. Her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and mixed media textiles chronicle her family’s African ancestry, her travels worldwide, and her witness to African American life.

The MacArthur Award recipient was also a researcher, historian, poet, author, illustrator, composer, and teacher who used her vast talents to draw harmony into a discordant world. When Robinson passed away, she entrusted her art, writing, personal belongings, and home studio to the Columbus Museum of Art in Ohio, her hometown museum.

Aminah Robinson: Journeys Home, a Visual Memoir brings together some of the artist’s most profound works and words, produced over seven decades from 1948 to 2012. Drawing upon Robinson’s historical research, folklore, and personal narrative, the exhibition presents a visual memoir of the artist’s life and a compelling tableau of the African American experience.

Can’t Hold Me Down

November 8, 2024 - April 30, 2025

About the Project

In Can’t Hold Me Down, Springfield photographer Ty Fischer partners with 17 students from Cliff Park High School to bring forth stories of personal challenge and resilience through dynamic layered portraits and story. Each student reflected on their educational journey, sharing experiences of struggle and strength.

Listening to each student’s story as he photographed them, Fischer let each student’s words guide his creative
approach in making their portrait. The resulting prismatic lenticular portraits combine three different images: a black-and-white portrait, a collage of each student’s most
impactful words, and an AI-generated image embodying the student’s positive emotions about their individual path of growth and perseverance.

About the Collaborators

High School Student Collaborators include Alyssa Allen, Lisa Baum, Peyton Berner, Walter Bostic, Anahstaciya Brown, Kamren DeArmond, Bradon Ervin, Jae’lyn Ervin, Kaylese Evans, Mireya Hammett, Samiya Hammond, Peter Hill, Montye Joyce, Ka’Miyah Robinson, Taylor Smith, Tre Walker, and Madison Wells.

Ty Fischer is a photographer and Springfield native. As an artist, Fischer is interested in exploring community narratives through his “Your Story” participatory storytelling and photography projects. Through this work, Fischer hopes that his portraits encourage conversation, connection, and the possibility of viewing others through their own lens.

Cliff Park High School is a unique learning environment serving students, ages 15-21, who have experienced significant life challenges necessitating a different approach to overcome each student’s obstacles to reaching graduation. Cliff Park offers flexible learning hours, accommodation around work schedules, hands-on technical and career training, and dedicated and specialized teachers. Each student can learn at their own pace, earning credits towards graduation as quickly as they can or as slowly as needed.

The Places We Return To…

September 28, 2024 - May 11, 2025

Eric Barth | Rod Bouc | Elsie Sanchez

In The Places We Return To, three Columbus-based painters explore evocative personal landscapes that reside deeply within. Colored by nostalgia, melancholy, and longing for something perhaps just out of reach, each artist wrestles with the complexity and intimacy of memory.

Though different in style and approach, each of the artists’ works hint at a tension just beneath the surface, a dark side, an unshakable feeling. By applying heavy pigments and then scraping them off the surface— obscuring and revealing—each artist uses methods that recall the intangible qualities of place-based memories.

 

About the Artists

Eric Barth grew up near Lake Erie, in the suburbs of Cleveland, where his early involvement in the arts began in the underground music scene. He holds a BFA from The Ohio State University and founded The Barth Galleries in Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio.

Rod Bouc was raised on a farm in Nebraska. He earned a BFA from the University of Nebraska and an MFA from The Ohio State University. For over thirty years, he served as a registrar and as an administrator of the Columbus Museum of Art.

Elsie Sanchez was born in Havana, Cuba, and immigrated to the United States as a young child with her family. She earned her BFA and MFA from The Ohio State University. She received the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award, the Greater Columbus Arts Council Arts Partnership Award, and was selected to participate in the XIII Havana Biennial.

Line | Drawing Meaning from the Mark

July 20, 2024 - Ongoing

Curated from the museum’s permanent collection, this is the first of a new series of exhibitions exploring the big ideas of visual art.

Line is language. Line is expressive. It can whisper, shout, proclaim.
Line can be bold, certain, searching, delicate.
Line can be quick, clipped, staccato.
Line can be sinuous, curving, undulating.

Line can build stability through structure and scaffolding.
Line can convey movement and energy by changing direction.
Line can be an edge, a contour, a border.
Line can mark a boundary between what is and what isn’t.

Line can be an index of where the artist’s mind–or the artist–has traveled, a record of moving, searching, observing, measuring.
Line is a point traveling through space.
Line is a path.

ZZ (detail image), Jack Moulthrop, ceramic, 2009

Celebrating Women: Female Artists from the Permanent Collection

Jul 15, 2020 – Current

Historically, female artists have been underrepresented in museum collections and are shown at significantly lower rates than their male counterparts. During the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage, the Museum is highlighting female artists whose works are in the permanent collection. These works of art showcase the wide range of media, subject, and technique with which female artists have traditionally worked and demonstrate how women continue to conceptually advance the art world today. Featuring work by well-known and lesser known artists alike, this show explores artistic contributions of female artists, not only regionally, but nationally and internationally as well. Artists in the show include Davira Fisher, Frances Hynes, Helen Bosart Morgan, Aminah Robinson, Alice Schille, Kara Walker, and Stella Waitzkin, to name a few.

In addition to new art on display, the Museum has been awarded a grant from Smithsonian Affiliations. Funding for this project allows us to host a Smithsonian speaker in support of their American Women’s History Initiative taking place this year.

Girl with Cigarette (The Model’s Break) (detail), n.d., Harriet Woodfin Titlow, Oil on canvas, Gift of Mrs. John Westcott