Collection: Bryan Robertson

About the Artist:

Bryan Robertson

Bryan Robertson grew up in the inner city of St. Louis, Missouri, in the Midwest region of the United States. He was fortunate to study the Russian language in primary school and had the chance to visit and stay with a family in Zhytomyr, Ukraine. This experience in post-Soviet Ukraine began his interest in researching authoritarian social structures. Additionally, Robertson was introduced to a shared sense of humanity and a love for visual language while being welcomed into a community half of a world away and visiting an art school in Zhytomyr.

Besides these experiences, his grandparents' escape from the Soviet takeover of Czechoslovakia and Poland influenced his thinking about the world. Robertson says, "from a young age, I have been writing, painting, drawing, and experimenting with methods of communication that aim to understand the human experience mainly for myself. After going to graduate school, I began to think about communicating with a larger audience and the individual’s relationship to the whole. For me, we live in a New Media Age, a time where the image is more important than words, and that is why I am a visual artist."

Robertson holds an MFA in painting and drawing with distinction from the University of Washington, Seattle. He has received several university and non-profit grants to support his research and held solo exhibitions in commercial and non-profit spaces. He has presented at national conferences, including the College Art Association, Foundations in Art: Theory and Education, SECAC, and the New Media Caucus. His recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition of moving images at the CICA Museum in Seoul, South Korea, and experimental sound and video at the Long Island Museum of Contemporary Art. Currently, he is an Associate Professor of 2-D visual arts at Yavapai College in the mountains of central Arizona between Phoenix and the Grand Canyon.