Elliott Jamal Robbins

When studying stone lithography as an undergrad in his home state in Oklahoma, Elliott Jamal Robbins first learned about Robert Blackburn while researching Black printmakers at his school’s library. After graduating from Arizona University, in 2018, he made his first pilgrimage to the Printmaking Workshop before his first New York solo show at Kai Matsumiya Fine Arts.

After five years, and a risograph virtual collaboration made during the pandemic— he made his way back to New York to make his first lithograph at the Printmaking Workshop. The mundanity of daily life in Robbins’ title Wake Up experiments with the joining of repetition that is inherent in both techniques of animation and print.

As the drawn sequence of a character walking through a single room with arched doors, maybe like mouse holes; where he is behind, and he is ahead—thus, where he comes out, he comes in— as a concise animation looping trick, yet it is contained within a still image. Robbins primarily works in ink and watercolor paintings on paper and stop motion animations. His work is indebted to dust bowl imagery from American Gothic literature and Black WPA artists, to the queering and appropriation of animations such as Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse, to explicit narratives on race from the South to the Cowboys in the West.

About the Artist

Elliott Jamal Robbins (b. 1988, Oklahoma) is a multimedia artist living and working between Tucson, AZ and Oklahoma City, OK. He has held exhibitions at Kai Matsumiya Fine Arts (NY); Galerie Nagel Draxler (Germany); Weiss Falk (Basel, Switzerland); The Drawing Center (NY); Kunsthalle Kade (Amersfoort, Netherlands); aguirree gallery (Mexico City); Housing Gallery (NY); Phoenix Art Museum (AZ); Greene Naftali Gallery (NY); and Flint Institute of the Arts (MI). He received his MFA from the University of Arizona in 2017. His work has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Hyperallergic, Contemporary Art Daily, and Time Out New York.