Christopher Robbins works on the uneasy cusp of public art and international development, creating sculptural interventions in the daily lives of strangers. He uses heavy material demands and a carefully twisted work-process to craft awkwardly intimate social collaborations. He has lived and worked in London, Tokyo, West Africa, the Fiji Islands, and former Yugoslavia, built his own hut and lived in it while serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Benin, West Africa, and spoke at a United Nations conference about his cross-cultural work in the South Pacific.
As a way of probing the troubling power dynamics he witnessed in his cross-cultural work, he co-founded the Ghana ThinkTank (GTT) in 2006. With the mission “Developing the First World," they collect problems in the so-called "Developed" world, and send them to think tanks they established in Ghana, Mexico, Iran, El Salvador, and Guantanamo Bay to analyze and solve (the network continues to grow). Then they work with the communities where the problems originated to implement those solutions - whether they seem impractical or brilliant. Robbins recently became the founding director of the School of the Arts at Binghamton University, and will travel to Skagaströnd, Iceland in the Summer of 2026 to craft a new series of sculptures with collaborator John Baca as part of the NES Artist Residency.
While at MacDowell, inn 2007, Robbins began work on Dirt for Nauru, in which he drags a barge of dirt by tugboat across the Pacific Ocean. During his 2025 residency, he developed concepts and sketches for the next phase on his collaborative art and housing justice project The American Riad, a 2,500 square foot sculpture that links formerly abandoned buildings to create a community land trust in the North End of Detroit.
