Phil Robinson
As a native Chicagoan, I relocated to St. Louis Missouri for a lecturer position at Washington University, St. Louis, Professor of Art, as Henry L. and Natalie Freund Fellow in Painting. That engagement included teaching and exhibition the St. Louis Art Museum. Later I joined the faculty of Art and Design at the University of Missouri St. Louis MO and am now Associate Professor, Studio Art.
In the last three years, I have exhibited nationally and internationally and participated in three, 1-month long artist residencies: the R.A.R.O. Residency in Barcelona, Spain (May 2024), the Mcube International Artists Residency Program in Lalitpur, Nepal (June 2024), and the Cycladic Arts Program, Paros, Greece, (November 2025). The Nepal residency included a solo exhibition. In Greece, I completed four paintings which were then exhibited alongside fellow resident artists.
I began as a painter and later transitioned to become a sculptor, a performance artist, and then to interdisciplinary arts following the need of the work. Pre-covid, socio-political satire typified my 3D works and digital prints. Paint is now the most immediate tactile medium to overcome the distancing of remote social contact. Anybody and everybody is worthy of a portrait seen through the eyes of their time. Every face being a narrative in progress, a witness, a culture creator, a protagonist/antagonist in the foreground of a larger contextual ground-scape. These portraits advance from the premise; no one is more or less human than anyone else. My portraits do not judge the sitter but present their predicament as a witness. I do not know what the painting should look like before completion, only that they look like themselves.