Robertson’s first West Coast solo show, Bend Di Young Tree debuts a series of mixed-media portraits and scenes from the artist’s early life, focusing on the forces that shaped his formative years in Jamaica.

A graduate of Stanford University’s MFA program, Robertson’s practice is inspired by nostalgia for his birthplace, confrontations with the American dream, and fantasies about the future of the African diaspora. He paints, collages, and assembles images from Black life, creating striking, often resplendent images that combine materials such as aluminum, textiles, bubble wrap, glitter, and acrylic paint. The imprint of Jamaican culture is evident throughout his work, from the artist’s patois-inflected titles to his merging and mixing of discarded and recycled materials, which echoes the resourcefulness and ingenuity necessary for a growing nation.

Bend Di Young Tree, which draws its title from a Jamaican idiom about the malleability of youth to forces of influence, is anchored by a suite of four related works that the artist calls his “pillar paintings.” In these autobiographical tableaux, which masterfully integrate reflective aluminum, patterned woven papers, and colorful chiaroscuro, Robertson offers a look into the familial relationships, institutions, and vernacular culture that informed his early life and worldviews. We see him as a young child, sitting at the kitchen counter of his grandparents’ home in Aberdeen, rural Jamaica, and at his fourth birthday party, posing with his late older sister, Jodiann. Other works show the artist in school and at church, surrounded by peers and authority figures whose arms reach across the panels. Throughout his work, the artist hints at his complicated feelings towards these often conservative institutions, while still registering their influence.

Robertson’s pillar paintings are complemented by new self-portraits depicting pivotal moments of transition between boyhood and manhood. These works explore notions of masculinity and adolescence, as well as Robertson’s departure from Jamaica for boarding school in the US. As his world expands, his compositions grow in complexity.

Bend Di Young Tree introduces audiences to Robertson’s practice through a deeply personal body of work — albeit one with a broad resonance. The exhibition reflects Robertson’s desire to examine and foreground his Jamaican identity — and the realities of the Caribbean experience, both good and bad — after half a life lived abroad. In this way, the artist invites viewers to reckon with the influences — cultural and kindred — that have shaped each of us.

A New Chapter: Arion Press at Haines is a collaborative exhibition celebrating the press’ recent move to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture.

Since 1974, Arion Press has partnered with contemporary visual artists to bring seminal texts to life. Collaborating with artists whose practices and concerns often dovetail with these written works, their publications offer fresh perspectives on literary texts ranging from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Octavia Butler’s Kindred to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. The exhibition at Haines showcases a selection of Arion Press’ handmade books alongside original artworks and limited edition prints by contributing artists such as Enrique Chagoya, Kenturah Davis, Michele Oka Doner, Natalie Frank, Tim Hawkinson, William Kentridge, Alison Saar, Vincent Valdez, Richard Wagener, and Kara Walker. Many of these artworks are on view for the first time, including works from Arion Press’ latest release, Fables of Aesop. 

A New Chapter includes Enrique Chagoya’s artwork for “The Lion and The Mouse,” a tale about size, power, and the reversal of fortunes in Fables of Aesop. As both an immigrant from Mexico and a naturalized US citizen, Chagoya’s painting and print-making practice examines the recurring subject of colonialism and oppression, drawing from secular, popular, and religious symbols, from both ancient and contemporary sources. Cartoon characters such as Richie Rich and Donald Duck serve as thinly veiled stand-ins for political figures in The Seven Deadly Sins (2020), a series of paintings satirizing the state of American politics. 

Kenturah Davis’ sensitive, powerful portraits depict Janie Crawford, the heroine of Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston’s canonical portrayal of Black womanhood. Using text as a point of departure, Davis explores the fundamental role of language in shaping how we understand ourselves and the world around us. Her signature “text drawings” fuse the acts of writing and drawing. Here, she repeatedly inscribes meaningful phrases from Hurston’s novel to build up her textured portraits, until their subject is revealed in dramatic chiaroscuro. 

In a suite of psychologically charged gouache and chalk drawings, Natalie Frank conjures the figure of Lenore from Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. She appears as a sorceress, an anthropomorphized raven, and as a series of sensuous, hallucinatory flashes that haunt Poe’s unnamed narrator. Frank’s practice examines feminism, sexuality, and violence in literature and contemporary discourse. Her lush, vividly colored works bring into focus a woman lamented after but never physically described, positioning Lenore as Poe’s true protagonist. 

Tim Hawkinson created his massive ink-drip drawings for Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein using a homemade contraption that mirrors gothic novel’s themes of technology, nature, and consciousness, as well as the pursuits of the novel’s titular inventor. For the project, Hawkinson built a customized pen tool with a hypodermic needle stylus and gravity-fed ink reservoir suspended from his studio ceiling. Sheets of butcher paper were fixed to the wall-mounted turntable. Hawkinson then spun the paper to make a series of horizontal lines to produce his cross-hatched images of scenes from the book. Ink dribbled downwards from each mark created by this idiosyncratic, unwieldy gadget, forcing the artist to embrace nature as a co-creator of his images. 

Alison Saar’s multi-disciplinary practice addresses issues of race, gender, and spirituality, particularly as they relate to Black female identity and the African diaspora. A New Chapter includes examples from Saar’s three collaborations with Arion Press, including The Escape, a black-and-white relief print rendering a pivotal scene from Kindred by Octavia Butler in her bold, distinctive imagery. These works are complemented by The Copacetic Suite, a series of striking linocut prints paying tribute to the artists of the Harlem Renaissance. In scenes animated by her vibrant palette and swirling, energetic mark-making, Saar imagines dancers, singers, musicians, and patrons enjoying Harlem’s heyday of the 1930s and 40s. 

About The Artist
Stuart Robertson (b. 1992, Kingston, Jamaica; lives and works in New York, NY) received his BA from Davidson College in 2015, and MFA from Stanford University in 2020. He was a finalist and commended artist in the National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2022, and has received residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Lawrenceville School, NJ; and The Space Program, San Francisco, CA. His works have been featured in exhibitions at the Ackland Art Museum, Chapel Hill, NC; Grand Rapids Art Museum, MI; Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, MA; National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica; National Portrait Gallery, Washington, DC; Orlando Museum of Art, FL; and Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson, NC.