May 8, 2021- June 19, 2021 — Scenes from the Middle Class Dana Robinson

May 8 - June 19, 2021 Opening Reception: Saturday, May 8, 12 - 4PM
Gallery hours: Open by appointment on Saturdays, 12pm-3pm. Please send us an email at specialist.gallery@gmail.com or DM us on instagram (@specialist_sea) to plan your visit!

To keep our community safe, we are limiting gallery occupancy to 3 visitors at a time during the open gallery hours between 12-3pm. Masks are required (let us know if you need one!), and plenty of hand sanitizer will be available.

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Specialist presents Scenes from the Middle Class by Dana Robinson. 

Robinson’s multidisciplinary practice explores ideas of youth, Black feminine identity, ownership and nostalgia. Through playfully reproducing and recombining vintage Black media, Robinson questions the idealized vision of American upward mobility epitomized by products such as Maybelline, Cheerios and Welch’s. In Scenes from the Middle Class, Robinson reworks the language of leisure and the relentless optimism of the American culture industry found in Black media such as Ebony magazine. Domestic products beckoning Black families into the comforting fold of a middle class life historically denied to them are dissected, collaged and presented as specimens in plastic folders. The figures of glamorous women bleed into each other on delicate georgette chiffon silk, and partially obscured faces smile through blotted acrylic paint. Stripped of context and legibility, the images are also stripped of their inherently white, capitalist visual language, one bent on selling domestic bliss through consumption and conformity. Through humor and absurdity, the works in Scenes from the Middle Class leave room for different futures and forms of desire. Life may never be perfect but it can be ours.

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Dana Robinson is a Brooklyn based multimedia artist. She earned her BFA in Design from Florida State University in 2012 and her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York in 2019.

Robinson has amassed a vast body of work throughout her career, utilizing a variety of materials such as fabric, paint, vintage materials, and other found objects to investigate questions of Blackness, womanhood, and ownership. Conversations of Dana Robinson’s eclectic collection have been covered by publications such as Vice, Ain’t-Bad, NY Mag’s Vulture, and It’s Nice That.

Since 2008, Robinson has exhibited her work in more than 70 shows across the United States and abroad. Most recently, Robinson took part in 2 online exhibitions, Future Fair with Selenas Mountain, and the Wassaic Project Holiday Fair, and Last Supper at LatchKey Gallery in Soho. She currently has a solo show at Selenas Mountain, Queens, NY and in 2021 Robinson will also be an artist in residence at Stoneleaf Retreat in 2021, and the Wassaic Project in 2022.