Robin J. Miller was born and raised in New York City. She is a unique artist who describes her art as “not a quilt, but it’s not your typical collage either; it’s a mixed-media form I kind of created myself.” The pieces are made of paper, acrylic painted images, beads, metal, fabric, and all are glued and sometimes sewed on. Miller says, “Paper is stiff and easier to manipulate. Sewing is something I learned to do as a young person. However, I’ve never enjoyed it,”
Miller received a BS degree in early childhood education from Baruch College in New York City and an MS degree in learning disabilities from Lehman College in the Bronx. She studied art at the Parsons School of Design and the New York School of Interior Design, both in New York City.
Miller was a special education teacher in the New York City school system for 30 years. She retired in 2012. She made cut-paper images to create bulletin boards that illustrated historical events because her students had difficulty remembering what they had read in history books. Her students were African-Americans, and she made her quilts to tell the story of their history and culture.
The Jazz History Quilt (1999) was Miller’s first quilt: “In my first year as an art teacher, I was searching for a project to do for Black History Month. I had a book called Talking to Faith Ringgold. In that book, she mentions that jazz was a real contribution that men gave to America, and quilt making, women.” African American quilters such as Harriet Powers (1837-1910) and the quilting women of Gee’s Bend also influenced her work. She researched subjects in depth.
Enslaved workers in the deep south brought their chants from West African and the Caribbean and used them for call and response songs. Their songs began in the fields and in the churches. Banjos were made from gourds and calabashes by attaching strings. The King of Ragtime was Scott Joplin, and New Orleans was the center of Jazz. Riverboats brought the music north. Bands were formed, and the Cotton Club and the Savoy Ballroom brought Jazz to the world. Duke Ellington, big bands, and the New York skyline at night’s end complete the quilt. The pictured quilt is the cover of her book The Jazz History Quilt, published in 2005.
“When I was five years old, an older cousin said to me, ‘Robin, I want you to know that our family comes from African people.’ I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m not African, I’m not African!’ I had seen Africans in cartoons, and I could not relate to any of these representations. It was all negative; it was all buffoonery. It was not something that was ever talked about…I always felt that white people were ‘regular people,’ so we must be irregular. We’re something less-than.” Miller’s developing understanding of African-Americans is reflected in the subjects that she chose.
Transatlantic Slave Trade is a powerful reminder of the fortresses, jail cells, barred windows, heavy wooden doors, and the chains and shackles that were used to take African people from their land of palm trees, to jails and then onto boats to a strange land, through a door of No Return. The quilt is bordered with the images of the arms and legs of shackled slaves. On her trips to South Africa, Swaziland, and Ghana her knowledge of conditions during the slave trade caused her to make the Journey to Hell Quilt (not shown). Shackled Africans walked as long as three to four months to reach the dungeons on the coast.
The Migration Quilt contains the story of the movement of African Americans from the South to the North from 1910 through 1970, known as the great migration. At the bottom of the quilt, the South, she included field workers and “strange fruit,” a reference to slaves hanging from trees. One of the reasons for the migration was to escape from terror and oppression, as referenced by the KKK image. Mr. Jim Crow references laws that marginalized and segregated African Americans. They were reduced to the caricatures in minstrel shows.
Trains made the migration possible. People headed to the big northern industrial cities to work in factories. The cities are named on the border of the upper section of the quilt. They took Jazz with them. The quilt is bordered by train cars.
Miller’s quilt art earned her the Thurgood Marshall African-American Educators award in 2001 and again in 2010. She was named New York City Art Teacher of the Year in 2007, and she was given the Exemplary Leadership Award in 2012.
“Observing the Civil Rights Movement as a child in the North led me to question my cultural worth. I could not comprehend why people I loved, viewed as intelligent and beautiful were so abused and disrespected. It created a shame that I was not always aware of but often challenged my confidence and self-esteem.” Miller’s quilt begins with the 1954 Supreme Court decision that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal” and violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. The arrest of Rosa Parks on December 1, 1955, resulting in the Montgomery Bus Boycott is depicted next. Parks was said to have been just too tired to move. Her response to that comment was, “The only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” The Little Rock Nine were the first African-American high school students to attend Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas. They had been selected on the basis of their exceptional grades. They were denied entry by Governor Orville Faubus, disobeying the Supreme Court order. President Eisenhower sent the National Guard to insure their protection. The Freedom Riders were a group of thirteen black and white people who left Washington, DC, on May 4, 1961, on a bus to New Orleans. “We Shall Overcome” became the anthem of the Civil Right Movement. The last images are Martin Luther King, Jr., the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial as he gave the I Have a Dream speech during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on August 28, 1963.
Miller made more than one quilt depicting the history of the Civil Rights Movement. The quilts included the date, July 2, 1964, when the Civil Rights Act was signed. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 was another major milestone she recorded on a quilt.
Juneteenth, on June 19, is a Federal Holiday that was signed into law on June 17, 2021, by President Joe Biden, making it the 11th official US holiday. Miller’s quilt celebrates the arrival in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, of Major General Gordon Granger to announce President Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation into law on January 1, 1863. The slave owners of Texas deliberately censored the information, and enslaved Black Texans were denied their freedom for 2 ½ years. General Granger read publicly General Order No. 3: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves…” On the quilt, a former slave, with detached shackles on his arms and legs, dances on a row of cotton plants. Ashton Villa, built in 1859, was the first brick structure erected in Texas by slaves. It remains in Galveston today. On hearing the news, the African Americans danced in the streets. The bottom border of the quilt depicts a long row of cotton plants.
At the top of the quilt, the Stars and Stripes flies at the left and the Juneteenth Flag at the right. The Juneteenth flag is also red, white, and blue. Designed by Ben Haith in 1997 and refined in 2000, the red arc signifies a new horizon for all. The five-pointed white star of the American flag signifies African-American freedom in all 50 states, and it also is a reference to Texas as the Lone Star state. The twelve-pointed starburst surrounding the star is a nova or new star.
Since retiring in 2012, Miller and her husband James Miller have continued to collaborate on her quilts and his writing. They published The Faithful Journey–From Slavery to Presidency (2018), and several other books. They also conduct Race Relationship workshops. In 2025 Miller’s A Sankofa Journey, the African in America Life, were displayed at the John F. Kennedy Museum in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts. She is the resident artist at the Zion Union Heritage Museum, also in Hyannis Port.
Her work has been displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. Miller reflected on her work: “Through in-depth study and handling of the subject matter, I understood that African Americans did not come from an ignorant society of jungle bunnies but were cruelly enslaved by people who were more concerned with financial gain than humanity…Later, I felt proud to be from the group of people who fought nonviolently for what they should have been given as a birthright.”
“I don’t have control over making a difference, I just do the work. In every show I do, there’s something I learn. Ideas spring from surroundings, perhaps when people come to my shows. Perhaps I might change a perspective,” or someone could respond, “’What? I didn’t know that.” (Robin J. Miller)
