2/14 - 3/21/2020

Photos by: Jesse Ly

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BasketShop is pleased to introduce Emma Robbins for her first exhibition in Ohio titled 5,172. For her installation, Robbins is displaying new hand-stitched objects alongside portraits from her ongoing photographic series, calling attention to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) [italics] crisis, an epidemic throughout the Americas, both on Native Nations and off reservations communities, including her own reservation, the Navajo Nation. Robbins illustrates that these women are more than statistics, they are mothers, sisters, nieces and granddaughters, etc.

The exhibition's title, 5,712 references the amount of reported cases in the United States of murdered and missing Native women in 2016. It is important to note that this number only reflects the reported cases, and that it is estimated that there could be thousands more of sisters lost, as cases often go unreported. Often times authorities refuse to take these cases seriously and do little, or nothing.

Robbins' work references the misconceptions of Indigenous Peoples, combining the idea of "the noble savage" with actual items found on reservations, pan-Indigeneity and traditional items, unique to her own Navajo culture. A large part of her work also brings elements of humor into the pieces she makes, something many Natives use as a coping mechanism to deal with tough issues those living both off and on reservations deal with on the daily.

Emma Robbins (Diné, b. 1986) lives and works in Los Angeles and on the Navajo Nation. She completed her BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and studied Contemporary Latin American Art in Argentina. She is the Director of the Navajo Water Project, providing access to clean, running water to communities on the reservation. Robbins has been featured in Nylon, VICE, Got A Girl Crush and Native America Calling, and has lectured at Tufts University, MIT, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Global Climate Action Summit and the Indigenous Peoples March for her art, activism and humanitarian work. Robbins is a current Aspen Institute fellow.