Dana Robinson (b.1990) is a Black, queer, artist. Robinson was born in Brooklyn, raised in St. Petersburg, FL, and currently living in Brooklyn, NY. Her art practice engages with themes of youth, femme identity, ownership, and nostalgia, utilizing a diverse array of mediums including painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric. Her distinctive approach often incorporates vintage Black media, recontextualizing it through a combination of reproduction and alteration to blur traditional lines.
Robinson’s dynamic body of work has been showcased at prominent venues such as the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Texas State University, Maryland Institute College of Art, A.I.R. Gallery, 92nd Street Y, and The Bureau of General Services—Queer Division. Not limited to traditional gallery spaces, her talents extend into public art installations, including notable projects for ArtBridge in Bushwick and the Empire State Building in New York. Additionally, Robinson’s skills in art curation are exemplified in her role as Arts Editor for APOGEE Journal.
Her contributions to the field have been recognized with fellowships and residencies, including those at A.I.R Gallery and the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP). She has received prestigious grants from the Puffin Foundation and the New York Council on the Arts, which supported her installation for the Wassaic Project’s winter show.
Her work has also been featured in respected publications like the New York Times Magazine and The Baffler and has been critically discussed in It’s Nice That, Ain’t Bad magazine, and VICE. Robinson’s recent international engagement includes exhibitions at the MECA Art Fair in Santo Domingo, DR, and Sanji Gallery in Seoul, South Korea.
She has recently shown her work at Yankee Stadium in New York and at Zieher Smith in Nashville, TN.
Artist Statement
Using painting, collage, printmaking, and fabric I address the topics of youth, femme identity, ownership, nostalgia through combining, reproducing and blurring vintage Black media. My visual language uses primarily 70’s Ebony magazines as a source material. I select stylized advertisements or editorial images that highlight the idea of upward mobility and a growing black middle class. This pop media leaves little room for deviation away from a cis hetero patriarchal middle class lifestyle. This is the life we are meant to aspire to but consistently fail to achieve to perfection due to not wanting to or it being out of reach. While being pushed and pulled towards this goal of a “perfect” I address the ways we deviate from this norm and find ourselves. Employing a language of humor and relaxation, I open up spaces of laughter and irony, while retaining an empathetic quality.
As these images are separated from their origins or recreated, their definitions change. The images are pared down to almost unrecognizable images that dissolve into flashes of skin and color, making an atmosphere that gently circulates and never quite settles. In the banality of the content is the intensely personal that reveals without giving everything away.
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