'Truly Laveda Cooper', May 2024, Acrylic on wooden panel. Courtesy of Dana Robinson
Magazines often act as anchors to a time past – holding within them not only images, but entire emotional, social and cultural landscapes. In the case of 1970s Ebony, these pages offer a particular lens for Brooklyn-based artist Dana Robinson: one shaped by aspiration, visibility and the construction of Black life within a moment of profound social and political shift.
Robinson’s work engages with this tension – between presence and distance, clarity and obscurity, memory and reconstruction. Drawing from archival imagery, her practice inhabits an in-between space: a suspended moment where something is captured yet remains in motion. Like memory itself, these images appear slightly out of reach – undeniably there, yet defying to be fully fixed. Through processes of fragmentation and reassembly, Robinson disrupts the polished surface of magazine imagery, revealing both its promises and its limitations. What emerges is not a singular narrative, but a multiplicity of possible readings – an exploration of identity, belonging and representation. Her work holds space for contradiction: aspiration alongside exclusion, beauty alongside unease, clarity alongside ambiguity.
In our conversation ahead of her upcoming presentation at 1–54 Contemporary African Art Fair in New York, with Kates-Ferri Projects, Robinson navigates these layered temporalities – her relationship to the past as a site of both reconstruction and projection, and to the present as something more elusive, less easily held.
Dana Robinson, 2025. Courtesy of Jeff Barnett-Winsby.
Nisha Merit
Could you please tell me about your art practice – what are the themes you are interested in?
Dana Robinson I work a lot with ideas of home and femininity, and the ways those different spaces have been created within the context of Black culture. I have a graphic design background and love magazines, but a lot of the time those magazines didn’t include Black people. I came across an old boxing magazine and the images were incredibly striking. You see boxers and moments of violence captured as still images. But I realised very quickly that it wasn’t very relatable for me or for most people. So I started moving towards Ebony magazines, mostly because they offered a broad cross-section of Black life, the advertisements in Ebony were very relatable to the products we had – Häagen-Dazs ice cream, various appliances. Not that those things are exclusive, but seeing them in the context of a Black family and Black women changed the way I related to and understood my past. As a queer artist working with these images of femininity, they are very specific and empowering, but often I don’t feel like I fit into those spaces. So I wanted to deconstruct these images and recreate them in a way where I felt more included.
NM
The images you use for your work focus on issues primarily from the 1970s. Why that era – what makes it interesting to you as opposed to a more contemporary setting?
DR It has a sense of timelessness. People recognise the colours and styles, and they’re able to connect to them and feel a kind of ownership. More modern images can sometimes feel more divisive. I worked in a vintage store as a seamstress, and seeing how people reacted to different styles was fascinating. Their faces would light up, even if they hadn’t grown up in that time. But also, the period sits within the Black Power movement and before the crack epidemic. There was a sense of life and optimism – a moment of extreme potential – that I wanted to focus on.
NM
I think we often feel more open to question and to rearrange the past because we have a certain distance to it – which you do in your work through cutting and recombining images in ways that feel both speculative and playful. At the same time, cutting is also a violent act, which creates an interesting tension. How do you think about that within your process?
DR Definitely. I think about it like paper dolls. I grew up playing with them – they have elaborate outfits, and you can rearrange them however you like. That sense of play is part of it. But it’s also about dissecting these timeframes to understand them better – to see myself and others within them, and to recognise how time collapses, how past events continue into the present and future. It’s about blending those timelines. There is violence in it, but I also think of it in terms of childbirth. To make something new, to bring something forward, you have to break something apart.
NM
Your work is often obscured or deconstructed and fragmented rather than a cohesive arrangement, suggesting a multitude of possibilities, readings and scenarios. Especially the portraits you show, feel like that – slightly distorted, not entirely sharp, yet still recognisable. Why do you choose to depict them in this way?
DR I wanted to create a kind of veil between the viewer and the people in the images. There’s often a sense of entitlement towards Black lives – our opinions, style, space. Blurring creates distance, but also desire. The viewer knows something is there but can’t fully access it. The people in these ads consented to their images being reproduced endlessly for capitalist purposes. Pulling them out of that cycle feels like a small act of resistance – a radical aspect of my work, prioritising people over profit. By blurring these ads, I remove corporate power and bring the focus back to the individuals.
I like withholding information. It also removes the capitalist aura of advertisements by stripping away text and distorting features. Sometimes the figures look slightly unsettling, even though the original context might be something cheerful, like a cigarette ad or a leisure activity. Ultimately, removing and altering the context opens up new possibilities for interpreting the lives within the images.
NM
What is the process of making them like?
DR I take an image from a magazine – usually from the 1950s to 1970s, because the paper is larger. I place plastic over it and paint on the plastic, matching the colours. Then I transfer that onto an acrylic-washed wood panel. When I pull the plastic away, it creates these rich, rippled textures. I never know exactly what it will look like, and I enjoy that unpredictability. It’s a process of chance. I started doing this because I used to make very small, intricate collages – placing glitter with tweezers – and it became overwhelming. I wanted to ‘paint without painting’, and this technique emerged from that.
NM
What is your upcoming exhibition at 1–54 about?
DR I created a series of full-body portraits from advertisements, focusing on how Black excellence manifests – what it means and whether it even exists, or if it’s a construct shaped by white supremacist patriarchal culture. I think the idea of excellence can feel like a trap – like perfection, which isn’t really attainable. It’s defined differently by different people, so it’s elusive. To me, Black excellence might simply be people being themselves and feeling free. That’s not perfection, but self-possession. It’s powerful and allows more freedom when we realise there’s no fixed definition.