Cooper Union BFA 1966
Yale University Summer School of Art 1965
The City College of New York BSLA 1995

Joyce Robins at 55 Mercer
Unlike sculptors, potters have never really convinced us that their works are not utilitarian artifacts. A ceramic vase, however beautiful, can hold salad dressing. What is most striking, then, about Joyce Robins's exhibition of six upright ceramic elements and 50 basket forms is how she both makes and negates reference to utilitarian functions. Placed on the floor at one edge of a long narrow gallery, in a container shape - emphasized by the lighting - which echoed the shapes of the individual baskets, this group of works appeared like a clearing in a park. The installation was very beautiful.

Robins is a draftsman in clay. As LeWitt draws lines to create modern equivalents to frescoes, and Patrick Ireland draws with string to define a perspectival space, so she draws in clay to exhibit the physical capabilities of her medium. In earlier wall pieces Robins drew lines on flat clay plaques. Here, her lines, now composed of handrolled clay, are the art work. Bundled together, the lines comprise the vertical pieces: loosely woven, they create the warp and woof of her baskets. The glazed color glitters, an effect emphasized by the gallery's reflective white floor. Robins's colors can be elegant, cheap and garish, or neutral as in several white pieces. As the colors of the works vary, so also do their shapes. Some baskets a foot across and a few inches deep could serve as actual containers others sprawl on the floor, like one that looked like a parody of Laocoön, the biting snakes and dying priest flattened into a heap.

As her verticals support nothing, so Robins's baskets contain nothing. But since they might be pressed into use, what set them off unmistakably as art works was her installation. Carefully positioned on the floor, each piece functioned as part of a clearing the viewer could not enter. Today, when much sculpture defines its space by pushing the viewer around, Robins's art makes a quiet quasi-political statement: made of common materials, whose vulnerability the installation emphasized, her unaggressive sculptures achieve a commanding presence.

Text by David Carrier - in: Art in America, March 1987


Joyce Robins
If there are gender differences that can or should be exploited by women artists what are they and in what experiences do they lie?...

I am sitting in the country on a rainy morning and I am looking at a photograph. It is black and white. Two objects fill the frame from left to right. Above them are some obscure and out-of-focus patches. Below, they sit on what seems to be a rough-cut disc of stone. The object on the left, modeled in plaster, is an infant's head, eyes closed, lying on its right cheek. It is slightly abstracted in a poetic, Medardo Rosso-like way. Overlapped by this head and butting against it where one would expect to see a neck is a smoothly polished ovoid of marrble. Coming out of the shadow between these two things is a raised lip, making a slender crescent that moves across half of this "egg." The crescent's tip touches a circular plane made when a small section was cut from this object. It is clear that in profile this removed section would be identical with the arc of the lip first noted. There is also a small raised half circle in the far right of this circular plane.

It is so difficult to express the feelings that this photograph creates in me. Some of the things are easy to speak of, like the juxtaposition of the smooth egg and the rough head - a promise and its realization. There are darker thoughts. Is the child sleeping or dead, or, most beautifully, not yet born? And moving into the world of images without words, I perceive something in the slice and the section that has to do with a duality that exists in being a mother: to have something by giving it up. For me the incredible beauty of these black and white images goes on and on, echoing through the real, the visual world.
Sisters and brothers, the photographer and the sculptor of the objects are the same person. The child's head was modeled in 1906 and the egg was carved in 1920. In 1923 Brancusi pushed them together in his studio and took this photo. There is no gender in art.

In: Tema Celeste - Contemporary Art Review, 1992

55 Mercer Street Gallery, New York, 1997, 1996, 1994, 1993
Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie NY, 1992
55 Mercer Street Gallery, New York, 1991, 1990, 1988, 1987, 1986,1984, 1983, 1981, 1980
Nobe Gallery, New York, 1979

Pierogi 2000: Flatfiles, Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro, NC 1997
Pierogi 2000: Flotfiles, The Gasworks, London and Corner House, Manchester, England
Current Undercurrent, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn 1997
Visiting Faculty, College Center Gallery, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie NY 1996
Insites II: Lower East Side Artists Re-Think Neighborhood Streets, Abrons Art Center, Henry Street Settlement, New York January 1996
Domestic Policies, Art Gallery of the State University of New York at New Paltz June 1995
Function, Gallery 128, New York 1995
Insites: Artists Designing Sites On The Lower East Side, Abrons Art Center, Henry Street Settlement, New York 1994
Hundred Hearts, The Contemporary, New York 1994
Friends, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York 1994
Drawings, Wynn Kramarsky Gallery, New York 1993
Drawings, Jessica Berwind Gallery, Philadelphia 1993
Summer Group, Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia 1993
A New American Flag, Max Protetch Gallery, NewYork 1992
The 55 Ferris Street Show, (Curated by Frederieke Taylor) Brooklyn, 1992
WFMU Group, Germans Van Eyck Gallery, New York 1992
Group Show, Artists Space, New York 1992
Group Show, Sculpture Center, New York 1992
Four Artists: Haynes, Metz, Nozkowski, Robins, 55 Mercer, New York. 1992
Object / Subject, Paul Cava Gallery, Philadelphia 1991
Group Show, Sculpture Center, New York 1988
No Peace / Know Peace, 128 Rivington Street, New York 1987
The Suitcase Show, Linz, Austria; Warsaw, Poland 1987
The Inspiration Comes From Nature, Jack Tilton Gallery, New York 1986
Off the Wall, (Curated by Carlo McCormack and Earl Willis) Kamikaze Club, New York 1986
55 Mercer Street at Drew, Drew University, Madison, New Jersey 1986
Letters, (Curated by Judy Collischan and Carol Becker Davis) The Clocktower, New York 1986
Smart Art, (Curated by Joseph Masheck) Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 1986
The Gathering of the Avant-Garde: The Lower East Side 1950 - 1970, Kenkelaba House and the Henry Street Settlement, New York 1985
Small Scale Sculpture, Mathews Hamilton Gallery, Philadelphia 1984
Reflections, Hillwood Art Gallery C.W. Post University, Greenvale, New York 1984
Hundreds of Drawings, Artists Space, New York 1984
Is This a Natural Worid, (Curated by Eve Sonneman) Cirrus Gallery, Los Angeles 1984
Twelve Years: 55 Mercer, 55 Mercer Gallery, New York 1983
Polychrome Sculpture, (Curated by Marjorie Strider) Lever House, New York 1982
Outdoor Sculpture Garden, Ward's Island, New York 1981
Installations in Five Elements, Kenkelaba House, New York 1981
Five Sculptors, Nobe Gallery, New York 1981
Scale and Matter, Soho Center for Visual Artists, New York 1975
Group Show, Artists Space, New York 1975
Joyce Robins and Paula Tavins, 55 Mercer Gallery 1974
Women Artists at Williams College, Williams College Art Gallery, Williamstown MA 1972
Thirteen Women Artists, 117 Prince Street, New York 1972

New York State Creative Artists Public Service Grant for Sculpture 1982

Lawrence Alloway:
„Review“ The Nation January. 1974
„Review“ The Nation March. 1972
"New York Women Artists" (catalog essay), Albany, New York. 1972
David Carrier:
"Joyce Robins" Art in America, March 1987
Victoria Donahoe:
"Small Scale Sculpture" Philadelphia Inquirer, January 14, 1984
Jill Dunbar:
"Scale and Matter" The Villager, March. 1975
Yanick Rice Lamb:
"Flag Deconstruction" The New York Times, January 1994
Joseph Masheck:
"Joyce Robins" Smart Art, New York. 1985
"Constructive Issues In Relief" Artforum, November. 1982
John Perpault:
Review The Village Voice, 1972
Fredrieke Taylor:
„55 Ferris Street Catalog“ June 1992
Judy Van Wagner:
"Reflections" (catalog essay) Greenvale NY. 1984
Ellen Wexler:
"In-sites" (catalog essay) New York, 1995