COLUMBUS, OHIO.- The Columbus Museum of Art (CMA) has selected Allie Martin as the second Aminah Robinson Writing Resident. The program supports and amplifies the work of African American artists while honoring the legacy of Robinson, a beloved Columbus artist.

The annual residency program awards a U.S.-based African American writer, scholar or researcher the opportunity to spend 90 days working on a writing or research project in the late artist’s newly renovated home studio in Columbus, Ohio along with a $15,000 cash award.

Martin is an assistant professor in the Department of Music at Dartmouth College. She is an ethnomusicologist who explores the relationships between race, sound and gentrification in Washington, DC. Utilizing a combination of ethnographic fieldwork and digital humanities methodologies, she considers how African Americans in the city experience gentrification as a sonic, racialized process. Her work has been supported by the Ford Foundation, the Smithsonian Institution, the Society for American Music and the American Musicological Society.

“I’m honored to have been chosen as the second Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson Writing Resident,” said Martin. "It is a privilege to be able to spend time living and writing in the home of Aminah Robinson. I look forward to engaging with the museum and the broader community in Columbus about my work on sound and gentrification."




While in residence, Martin will be working on her ongoing book project, “Intersection Listening: Gentrification and Black Sonic Life in Washington, DC” — an ethnography about what gentrification sounds like in DC.

"Allie Martin’s application stood out for its exceptional merit and originality, and she demonstrates a clear understanding and admiration for Aminah's artistic vision,” says Larry Young, a member of the Columbus Museum of Art’s Board of Trustees and juror for this year’s residency.

Jurors for the residency are scholars and writing professionals who represent a diverse range of genres and disciplines. They included inaugural Aminah Robinson Writer in Residence Darlene Taylor, CMA board member Larry Young and writer and art critic Darla Migan.

Aminah Robinson is known for works inspired by the Ghanaian concept of Sankofa, which means to retrieve the past, Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson lived and worked in Columbus, Ohio creating sculpture, large multimedia works she called RagGonNons, paintings, drawings, prints, button-beaded dolls, handmade books and illustrated journals. She also published children’s books grounded in African American ancestral legacies.

When Robinson passed away in 2015, she left her estate to the Columbus Museum of Art. In 2020, the Museum established the Aminah Robinson Legacy Project to increase awareness of her work and to place Robinson in the pantheon of the most important 20th- and 21st-century American artists where she deservedly belongs.