Stacey Robinson Artist Talk

Concurrent with “In Blackest Shade, In Darkest Light” exhibition, Krannert Art Museum is hosting an exhibition featuring Black faculty in the School of Art & Design. This exhibition includes participating artists Patrick Hammie and Stacey Robinson. The collaborative exhibition explores Black identity, collectivity, positionality, healing, innovation, and education as explored via a multi-leveled/multi-dimensional immersive, critical, and openly reflective space. For more information, please visit the Krannert Art Museum website.

Participating artist, Stacey Robinson will give a lecture on February 2, at 10:45 am in the William M. Staerkel Planetarium. A “Chat & Chill” with the artist will be held at 12 pm, in the gallery.

Robinson is one of seven artists participating in “In Blackest Shade, In Darkest Light,” In addition to a full-length video, Robinson’s work includes three large digital drawings that are 70 x 44 inches each. The images are inspired by the artist’s vinyl record collection and difficult-to-find additions that elude him during research to connect golden-age hip-hop samples to their source material. His collection ultimately fuels the series that incorporates animation and comic book illustrations ignited by the Black cultural wealth of hip-hop. He explains his process “as a collage culture of various influences that tether the past to the speculative future through the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, meaning to ‘go back and get it.’ We go back and retrieve Black pasts, bring them into the future with us as a means of defining our Black liberated futures.”

Robinson was a 2019-2020 Nasir Jones Hip-Hop Fellow at Harvard University’s Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. After completing his Masters of Fine Art at the University at Buffalo in 2015, the artist has traveled internationally, discussing the complexities of decolonized future spaces. As one half of the collaborative team “Black Kirby” with artist John Jennings, Stacey creates graphic novels, gallery exhibitions, lectures, and workshops that use world-building strategies to imagine new worlds inspired by design, hip-hop, the arts and sciences, and diasporic African belief systems.

Robinson’s latest graphic novels are I Am Alfonso Jones, written by Tony Medina (2017), available from Lee & Low Books, and Across the Tracks: Remembering Greenwood, Black Wall Street, and Tulsa Race Massacre, written by Alverne Ball (2021), available from Abrams Books. Recent exhibitions include Ascension of Black Stillness (CEPA Gallery in Buffalo, NY) and The Black Angel of History (Carnegie Hall’s ‘Afrofuturism Festival) in 2022.