FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Andrew Cornell Robinson:
Confabulations & Fantabulosas, Queer Abstraction as a Living Archive
November 19 to December 12, 2026
Opening reception: Thursday, November 19, 6 to 8 pm
Equity Gallery, 245 Broome St, New York, NY 10002
www.nyartistsequity.org
Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 12 to 6 pm
Equity Gallery presents Confabulations & Fantabulosas, Queer Abstraction as a Living Archive, a solo exhibition of new work by New York artist Andrew Cornell Robinson. The project received a 2026 NYSCA Artists Grant. It is a body of assemblages that work as portrait reliquaries, each holding a queer life in the space between visibility and erasure.
About the project
Confabulations & Fantabulosas is a project about erasure. It gathers a body of assemblages, printed and painted surfaces layered on canvas, paper, ceramic, metal, and wood, with the archive of images, narratives, and artifacts that fed each one. Each work is a container for a queer and peculiar saint: a person, place, or thing held sacred and profane at once. Each begins in something real, a life, a memory, a history. Where the record runs out I confabulate, re-assembling the figure from the gaps left when a history is obscured, erased, or edited to fit the norms that keep control. All of them are made the way Caravaggio made saints: miracles carried by ordinary, breakable people, the frailty showing before the halo.
A confabulation is the story you tell to cover a hole in memory. Fantabulosa comes from Polari, the old British gay slang, and means fantastic and fabulous at once. Together they name the method and the attitude. The work starts where history runs out. I find or place a queer or peculiar person, then build: layering, crushing, painting, obscuring, then sanding back down until, scratching through the surface, a pentimento emerges. The figure arrives through layering, underglaze decals, and erasure, worked until it surfaces and vanishes in the same gesture, until it reads as a relic rather than a record.
The erasure lives in the layers. That is what pressure does to a life. It leaves a mark, a hand, an object, a stain that won’t fire off.
Alongside the objects, this website holds what they can’t: the images beneath the obfuscations, a year of daily collages, and the ex-votos visitors leave, a message, a memory, an artifact, each one translated into Polari, the coded slang gay men and lesbians used to talk past the lily law. Together they make a deliberately partial archive. It never assembles the whole picture, and still it makes the case that these lives were worth living. No explanation, no justification.
Exhibition essay
The poet, Steve Turtell has written an essay to accompany the exhibition. Fantabulosity Über Alles, Notes on Andrew Cornell Robinson.
“Confabulations and Fabulosas is confounding to the uninitiated not used to such playful, shame-banishing work. It honors the dishonored, resurrects a past through what Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation”[1]—an adjunct to Robinson’s confabulations—and creates a sacred space which reclaims the dignity denied the historically erased.”
Tales of Woe & Wonder: Songs Behind the Art
Original recordings exploring the stories that shaped the exhibition.
Robinson has gathered a series of stories through lyric writing and musical confabulations, moods, and memories that play in parallel to what appears in clay and on canvas.
Listen
The Artist
Andrew Cornell Robinson is an interdisciplinary artist born in Camden, New Jersey, in 1968. He makes paintings, prints, and ceramics that work on memory and queer revisionist history, layering color, texture, and form across many surfaces. He grew up on the edge of New York and on his family’s farm along the Delaware River, and the work keeps returning to place, identity, erasure, and presence. He holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from the School of Visual Arts, and teaches at Parsons School of Design. His work has shown in more than 100 exhibitions, including at the UK Crafts Council and the Ross Art Museum. He has held residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park, Guttenberg Arts, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and the Agastya Foundation, and received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts. He lives and works in New York City. www.andrewcornellrobinson.com
Press contact:
Confabulation No.4 (Oranges are not the only fruit), glazed porcelain, with underglaze silkscreen print decal transfer, cast colored plastic, 2023, 16 x 16 x 3 inches
Confabulations & Fantabulosas is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
[1] In Hartman’s words, “impossible writing that attempts to say that which resists being said” due to gaps and erasures in archival history.