Name Walter Robinson | Role Art critic | |
Walter Robinson (a/k/a Mike Robinson) (born 1950) is an art critic who writes a column on contemporary art in New York City for Artspace. Robinson was a contributor to Art in America (1980-1996), the art editor of the East Village Eye, a founding editor of Art-Rite magazine and the founding editor-in-chief of Artnet Magazine (1996-2012). He also co-produced the public-access television show, GalleryBeat.
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Life and education
Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, and raised in Tulsa. He moved to New York to attend Columbia University in 1968. Subsequently he graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973. He was a long term resident of Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side.
Life as an artist
Robinson is also a postmodern painter whose work has been exhibited at Semaphore, Metro Pictures Gallery, Brooke Alexander Gallery, Haunch of Venison and numerous other venues. His work in the early 1980s chiefly consisted of stenciled cliche images and painted cliche images often based on pulp book covers (for example his Motel Marriage (1979) painting) or greeting-card kittens. Also, he produced a series of spin paintings. During that period he was associated with the artist group Colab.
In 2000, Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring, the owners of the Metro Pictures Gallery, presented a retrospective of paintings that Robinson had made in the 1980s.
Firecat Projects in Chicago presented a show of his paintings in 2012. In 2013 he had a one-man show at the Dorian Grey Gallery in New York City and in 2014 he received a retrospective exhibition at University Galleries at Illinois State University.