ROBYN HORN

Robyn Horn, 2017. Photo credit: Chroma

Robyn Horn (b.1951)


Robyn Horn was born in Ft. Smith, Arkansas, and graduated from Northside High School. With both her mother and her sister as painters, her interest in the arts was encouraged and she went on to earn a Bachelor of Fine Art from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas. Following college, she worked in the typesetting field in Little Rock, before becoming the chief photographer for Arkansas Parks and Tourism. After trying her hand at stained glass, she found wood.

In 1984, she began working on the lathe making wood bowls and vases which eventually evolved into carving wood sculpture. Over the past 30 years, she has developed an aesthetic through studying the work of sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth and David Nash, as well as painters’ work such as Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending A Staircase, along with Picasso and Braque’s Cubism. Horn has always worked in series, making sculptures that contain qualities of asymmetry, geometry, volume, lack of balance, and contrast with heavily textured surfaces. In 2005, she ventured into painting and explored similar qualities in two dimensions.

Robyn Horn’s work has been collected and exhibited by museums and galleries throughout the nation and internationally. Public collections include: The National Museum of American Art, The Renwick Gallery, Washington,D.C.; Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; White House Collection of American Crafts, Clinton Library, Little Rock, AR; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, AR; Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA; Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ; Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Mobile Museum of Art, Mobile, AL; The Center for Art in Wood, Philadelphia, PA; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; North Carolina State University, Gregg Museum of Art & Design, Raleigh, NC; Mint Museum of Craft & Design, Charlotte, NC; Detroit Institute of Art, Detroit, MI; Arrowmont School of Arts & Crafts, Gatlinburg,TN; and many others.

Horn currently lives and works in Little Rock with her husband John Horn, a letterpress printer.