Andrew Cornell Robinson
Andrew Robinson was born in 1968, in Camden, NJ, into a household under the constant threat of eviction and tumult. Art became a welcome relief, as did New York City in the 1980s, where he was spending less time in high school and more time in night clubs and art happenings in the East Village—a landscape of graffiti, ACT UP, and the Tompkins Square riots. This is the geography from which Andrew emerged, finding a lifeline in a trade. An apprenticeship in an Anglo-Japanese ceramics studio provided the fundamental knowledge of how to build kilns and the discipline of making something each day with his hands. For Robinson, craft is a radical gesture; a means of engaging the city’s intersectional communities, an inquiry into how we assemble in an open society. He utilizes the weight and permanence of fired clay to anchor the diverse voices in our public landscape.
Having failed to join the Navy to learn to weld, he learned that skill at the Maryland Institute College of Art, the School of Visual Arts. He has presented his work with the UK Craft Council, the Ross Art Museum, and had a solo show at the Ben Shahn Center for the Visual Arts. His work has been shaped by residencies at the Edward F. Albee Foundation, Peters Valley, Guttenberg Arts, Agastya Foundation in India, and Donna Karan’s Artisan Project in Haiti. A member of the faculty at Parsons School of Design, Robinson lives and works in New York City. His focus remains on the material reality of the work—the intersection of resilience and communal solidarity.
Artworks
Project rendering for Bellweather, 2026
Bellwether is a practical structure and a call to action. Inspired by Pete Seeger’s “Hammer Song,” it is an investigation of the “hammer of justice” and the “bell of freedom” as physical realities. The installation features a steel armature reminiscent of galvanized pipe playground jungle gyms, supporting a series of visceral ceramic bells. These forms are sites of encounter: working with local communities and public school students, Robinson employs maiolica glazes—a tradition dating back 2,000 years to Persia that has been adapted by cultures from Italy to the Americas. Each culture made this glazing tradition their own; here, it becomes a gesture of active welcoming. By inviting New Yorkers to apply their own marks to the white base glaze, the project becomes an embodiment of what it means to create something new together. Bellwether is a small, deliberate action intended to bring a diverse city together through the radical act of making.