Avis Robinson

American, 1953–2023

Avis Collins Robinson was an American artist best known for paintings and quilts that explore America’s often unacknowledged tensions over race, gender, oppression, and lost history. Her work is layered with images that reference the struggles of her ancestors – Nottoway Indian, African and European – famous African Americans like Harriet Tubman and John Lewis, and anonymous people whose ordinary lives bear witness to extraordinary courage and perseverance.

Avis used color, rhythm, and motion in surprising and revelatory ways to create striking abstract and figurative images with cloth, thread, and pigment. She erases the lines between painting and quilting ultimately synthesizing the two into a technique and an aesthetic that are hers alone. Her quilts with their bold colors and free-form lines and shapes, have been described as painting with cloth. Her paintings feature that same irrepressible sense of color, depth, and texture.

Courtesy of Columbus Museum of Art