There are many themes that run through my work, and then it's broken down to subdivisions.

And through the subdivisions are threads that come out of each theme.

Now, the different aspects of my work to try to document, let's say, one community.

It will not be done in one media.

One page may come in a quilt, another page in a walk stick, maybe two or three hundred pieces in cloth paintings, in the rag drawings, in the book series.

The work of artist Amina Robinson richly documents her family's history and the Columbus African American community.

My uncle handed so many of these stories down.

There are so many wonderful stories coming out of the Blackberry Patch that were passed on to those descendants of Poindexter Village like myself.

The Blackberry Patch was a neighborhood on the east side of Columbus, where one of the first public housing projects in the country, Poindexter Village, was built.

There are just two themes for Amina's prolific imagery.

I can just see it right now.

I can see it.

But it opened on.

April the 1st, 1940, and those first families in those 84 units, six buildings, were the first families who moved in to Poindexter.

On October the 12th, Columbus Day, 1940 President Roosevelt came through.

He started at Fort Hayes.

And with the whole presidential, I think there were three or four cars.

Well, my mother told me, because I was only eight months old, I said, you mean the president came in?

And she says, of course.

I said I have to go look that up.

Her work has a kind of naive, childlike quality to it.

But Amina is, you know, when you ask Amina how she's doing and what she's, she says, I'm walking.

And in a way, that generality applies to her work.

Denison Griffith recently curated an exhibition of Amina's work for the Columbus Museum of Art.

One reason why people, when they foresee her work, kind of think of it in terms of folk art, untrained art making, because she draws materials from everywhere.

She doesn't have that sense of preciousness about the material.

She doesn' necessarily need to go to an artist's supply store to get a piece of paper to do a drawing.

The paper that she uses is often handmade.

For years, when she had no money to buy materials, she would use the blank.

Cover pages and books.

There are drawings in our exhibition that's up presently that were done on the drawer lining paper from, you know, just any material she could lay her hands on.

I don't know why I use certain colors or why I used... All of these large running stitches.

It's a Riga knot and I will do a lot of drawing in this piece.

It's just how I feel and it's part of the stories that came through the crow man who lived in Poindexter Village.

There are a lot of stories, crow man tales is what I call them, and the story goes right behind the crow man there used to be a long cabin that sat at Clifton and Champion.

One day it was this great big fire and this woman was passing through who lived in the cabin.

Her house was on fire, and all at once, from the birds... Who lived on the rooftops, the pigeons, and the sparrows.

This snake roars up.

And this woman with the cane flashed she was gone.

And so when everybody ran to her log cabin...

The fire was out.

There's this extraordinary humanity in her art, a warmth and a real love for people and for living.

And what happens is, for those of us who don't come from the African American experience, who see the work, you get connected and you suddenly realize her work is one of the great bridgers that I know of for creating the sense of connectedness and kinship between people that do, in fact, come from slightly different cultures.

I'm just happy this work is here today in my lifetime.

Today is what we have.

I cannot see tomorrow, I can only dream, and I hold fast to those dreams.

And I hope that somehow, somewhere... Will inspire many of our young people to go on and to hold fast to their dreams.

But do what you have to do today.

Do the work.

Today.

That's all we have.