Andrew Cornell Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York City. His work includes paintings, ceramics, and works on paper.
Andrew Cornell Robinson (b. 1968, Camden, New Jersey) is a painter and ceramist whose work is rooted in material as a carrier of memory. He grew up between the outskirts of New York City and his grandmother’s farm along the Delaware River. Raised in economic precarity, Robinson entered an eight-year apprenticeship with an Anglo-Japanese ceramist, learning Raku kiln building and production ceramics. Working daily with heat, breakage, repair, and limited means shaped an early understanding of making as both labor and survival.
Robinson studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the Glasgow School of Art, later earning an MFA in painting from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. In the 1980s, he moved through the punk and new wave scenes of New York’s East Village, absorbing the mix of clubs, music, activism, and visual culture that circulated there. These parallel experiences—rural life and studio labor on one hand, urban subculture and improvisation on the other—continue to inform his approach to materials and form.
Robinson treats materials as containers of experience—built up, layered over, damaged, and carried forward. Through erasure and repair, he returns to images, places, and stories that are often misremembered, fragmented, or excluded from public record; confabulation and re-imagining play an active role in shaping his compositions. Drawing from personal history and queer radical traditions, he frequently employs forms of subcultural code-switching, including references to Polari, allowing meaning to surface indirectly through absence, obliteration, and fragmentation. While he works across media, his practice centers on painting and ceramic sculpture, which come together in assemblages where image and object are held in close, sometimes uneasy, proximity.
Robinson has participated over one hundred exhibitions and public-programs including “What We Make, Black Quantum Futurism,” an exhibition with Howardena Pindell, Andrew Cornell Robinson, and Hank Willis Thomas, et al, at the Ross Art Museum, “Ultra Pro-Sculptures that Cook” at Omi International Arts Center, “Debtfair” at the Whitney Biennial, “Assemble” at the U.K. Crafts Council, and a mid-career retrospective at the Ben Shahn Center for Visual Arts. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships from the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Guttenberg Arts, and the Agastya Foundation, and is a 2026 New York State Council on the Arts Artist Grant recipient. He is a member of the faculty at Parsons School of Design and Drew University. He lives and works in New York City.