The Hudson River Museum will host Expanding the View: A Gala to Benefit the Hudson River Museum two weeks from today–Friday, June 17. This is our most important fundraiser of the year, providing essential resources to the HRM and our community, and celebrating three outstanding honorees: Yonkers IDA, the Bernacchia family and Liberty Lines, and artist Jamel Robinson.

Today, we are highlighting Jamel Robinson. A painter, sculptor, writer, and performance artist based in Harlem, New York, Jamel’s artwork addresses the Black lived experience in America and his personal experience navigating life’s challenges. Robinson began his artistic journey as a poet and taught himself to paint to further his range of expression. Over the past ten years, he has evolved an individual style of abstraction, and in 2018 he began applying the paint directly with his hands and manipulating it with squeegees. Working predominantly on the floor, in a bent position of surrender, the paintings are a way he has processed personal struggles, but are also an area of openness and discovery. The process is physical. While many of his works are abstract, it’s impossible to ignore the presence of the body, his body, and the intended viewer.

All of us in the HRM community have been deeply moved by our work with Jamel over the past two years, first in his impactful role as fall 2021 Teaching Artist-in-Residence; and more recently as a teaching artist and poet at Enrico Fermi School, Yonkers Public Schools, through a dedicated School Violence Prevention partnership that elicited outstanding responses from the participating children and teachers. The artist made his museum debut at HRM in Jamel Robinson: Beauty from Ashes, which was on view October 15, 2021–January 16, 2022. The exhibition was prominently featured in The New York Times and on CBS News. Soon after, Jamel garnered further art world attention with a successful solo exhibition in 2022 at A Hug for the Art World in Chelsea.

Robinson has been featured in several solo gallery exhibitions, including at the Established Gallery and the Ivy Brown Gallery in New York and the Gallery Von Schmordenfaden in Copenhagen, Denmark. In 2018, his work was featured in 100 Works, curated by Derrick Adams, Oshun Layne, Larry Ossei-Mensah, Teriha Yaegashi, Stephanie Cunningham, Gabriel de Guzman, and Becky Elmquist and presented by ARTNOIR, LatchKey Gallery, and E+. His work was recently on view in The Eyes Have It at the Lehman College Art Gallery and at The Meeting Point, a pop-up gallery curated by Danny Baez in collaboration with ARTNOIR, REGULARNORMAL, and The Meatpacking District.

Please join us in congratulating Jamel on this honor and his exceptional contributions to our community.

Left: photo by Alex Bershaw @alexbershaw. Right: photo by Shane Samuels.