Fort Gansevoort in New York will present 25 works by the late Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson (1940-2015) in Beaded and Bound, opening on 19 November and running through 16 January. Organised in collaboration with the Columbus Museum of Art, where Robinson's work is a highlight of the collection, the exhibition gathers mixed-media books, embellished textiles and dolls in which embroidery, applique, writing, painting and drawing combine into tactile, richly layered narratives.

Robinson was born as her family moved into Poindexter Village, a new public housing estate in Columbus, Ohio, dedicated by Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1940 and one of the first federally funded projects of its kind built specifically to support African Americans. A museum honouring the estate's history is due to open in 2028. Apart from a few years in Boise, Idaho, while married to a man serving in the US Air Force, Robinson spent her life in Columbus, where she also studied art at college.

Her practice grew during the 1970s, when she worked for the city's recreation and parks department and often ran workshops. A study trip to Egypt in 1979 brought her the name Aminah, given by a holy man, which she legally adopted, and she first exhibited her work in the early 1980s. She described her sculptural reliefs on books as RagGonNon, interactive works that keep evolving and stay open to interpretation in the way literature does. She built them from shells, buttons and beads, and from a homemade compound she called hogmawg, a mixture of clay, leaves, twigs, mud, lime, animal grease and glue that she learned from her father, who first taught her bookmaking, while her mother taught her sewing and needlework.

The works are autobiographical and universal at once. A Holy Place: The Elijah Pierce Barbershop (1983) depicts her friend and spiritual mentor Elijah Pierce at work, celebrating the barbershop as a sacred place of connection and joy in African American communities. Women in Poindexter Village, Button Beaded Book (1989) remembers fellow residents of the estate, including a tribute to her mother tucked inside.