Walter Robinson

In 2025, Robinson was bestowed a posthumous doctorate degree in Fine Art from the New York Academy of Art, who also created The Walter Robinson Scholarship in his name.

• Birth Name — Walter Rossiter Robinson III • Born — 18 July 1950 • Birthplace — Wilmington, Delaware, U.S. • Died — 9 February 2025 • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Occupation — * Painter • publisher • art curator • art writer • Education — Columbia University • Other Names — Mike Robinson

Robinson was born in Wilmington, Delaware, on July 18, 1950, and was raised in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He moved to New York City to attend Columbia University in 1968. Subsequently, he graduated from the Whitney Independent Study Program in 1973. He lived in SoHo in the 1970s and on Ludlow Street on the Lower East Side in the 1980s and 1990s, and lived uptown with a studio in Long Island City in Queens.

Robinson was a postmodern painter whose work features painterly images taken from covers of romance novel paperbacks as well as still lifes of cheeseburgers, French fries, and beer, and pharmaceutical products such as aspirin and nasal spray. He also made and exhibited large-scale spin paintings in the mid-1980s, in advance of his colleague Damien Hirst. A 2014 touring exhibition of Robinson's paintings included more than 90 works dating from 1979 to 2014. It premiered at the University Galleries at Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois, and subsequently appeared in Philadelphia at the Moore College of Art. The show's final stop was at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City in September 2016. Robinson's works have been exhibited at several New York galleries since the 1980s, including Semaphore Gallery and Metro Pictures Gallery. An exhibition of his paintings, paired with a poem by Charles Bukowski, "There's a Bluebird in My Heart", was on view in Spring 2016 at the Owen James Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. In 2026, Robinson received posthumously a retropective art exhibition at Gallery Jeffrey Deitch in New York City.

Robinson was married four times; his second wife, Beatrice Smith, was sculptor Tony Smith's daughter. She died from AIDS-related complications in 1988, and after her death, Robinson adopted her daughter. At the time of his death, he lived in Manhattan with his fourth wife, Lisa Rosen. Robinson died from liver cancer (also reported as esophageal cancer) at home on February 9, 2025, at the age of 74.