Jamaican-American, b. 1992
Lives and works Lawrenceville, NJ
Stuart Robertson’s multimedia practice moves between figuration and abstraction, and includes painting, drawing, collage, sculpture, and installation. His work reflects his own diasporic experience of living between his birthplace of Kingston, Jamaica, and his current home of the United States.
Robertson’s latest works are mixed media portraits depicting scenes drawn from family albums, archives, and social media. He combines acrylic paint with everyday materials and post-consumption waste, including aluminum, insulation foam, bubble wrap, cardboard, and textiles. Robertson’s use of non-traditional materials highlights the conspicuous consumption of Black bodies and illuminates the duality of being coveted and discarded. His metallic-skinned subjects embody bling, shine, and glow, and his images of Black life, resplendent and irrepressible, reject distortion, misrepresentation, and erasure.
For Robertson, the Black body is “both vessel and substance,” and each portrait, intimate yet anonymous, “complicates the concept of identity and skin color-as-race.” Says the artist, “In my world, Black skin is durable, weatherproof, conductive, magnetic, flexible, percussive, and indestructible. These lustrous figures offer unusual interactions with images of Blackness and invoke metaphors of the Black body that position skin as much more than an indicator of race.”
Robertson received his MFA from Stanford University, CA in 2020, MSEd from the University of Pennsylvania in 2018, and BA from Davidson College, NC in 2015. He is a finalist and commended artist in the National Portrait Gallery’s 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition and earned a 2019 Cadogan Scholarship from the San Francisco Foundation. Robertson has received residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; The Space Program, San Francisco, CA; and The Lawrenceville School, NJ, where he is currently creating a new installation for the School’s H. Lyals Battle ‘67 and Darrel A. Fitzgerald ‘68 Atrium, in honor of Lawrenceville’s first Black students.. His work is included in the nationally touring exhibition The Outwin 2022: American Portraiture Today (2022-2024), and Homecoming: Art by Alumni at Van Every/Smith Galleries, Davidson College, NC.