about me
bio
Tyson Robertson is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and learning designer based in Central Florida.
Working in photography, video, installation, objects, and performance, he explores masculinity, identity, memory, and the cultural expectations that shape how people see themselves and others.
He holds an MFA in Studio Art from New York University and a BFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited at 80WSE Gallery, Gallery Aferro, the Scarab Club, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, among others, and is included in the collections of the Southeast Museum of Photography and Daytona State College. He is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant.
He is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at Valencia College. With over 12 years in higher education and 20 years in media production, he develops courses, training, and feedback systems that support visual literacy, experimentation, and creative problem-solving.
artist statement
My work examines masculinity as both lived experience and cultural construction. I am interested in the stories people inherit about gender, power, race, desire, vulnerability, and belonging—and in how images, objects, and public rituals keep those stories in circulation. Rather than offer a single definition of manhood, I create work that complicates familiar narratives and leaves room for contradiction, tenderness, humor, uncertainty, and change.
My process begins with curiosity and associative research. I follow connections across personal memory, social history, popular culture, found photographs, digital archives, sports imagery, and material culture. This branching process allows an image or object to lead toward an unexpected question, and that question often determines the form the work takes.
Photography remains central to my practice, but I also work with video, installation, performance, drawing, and constructed objects. Moving between digital technologies and traditional methods expands my visual vocabulary and allows each project to develop in the medium best suited to its ideas.
I am especially drawn to experiences that can be difficult to express directly. Art gives those experiences a visual and material language. Through documentation, appropriation, repetition, alteration, and juxtaposition, I examine whose histories are centered, how privilege and power shape perception, and how personal identity intersects with larger cultural systems. My engagement with lowrider culture and the experience of building cars have also shaped my attention to craft, customization, community, and the meanings carried by familiar objects.
Ultimately, I want the work to interrupt easy recognition. I invite viewers to look again at images and assumptions that may initially feel familiar and to consider how identity is performed, inherited, challenged, and remade.
selected cv
Born in Fresno, CA
Lives and works in Central Florida
EDUCATION
MFA, Studio Art, New York University, New York, NY
BFA, Photography Parsons School of Design, New York, NY
AAS, Photography Daytona State College, Daytona Beach, Florida
RESIDENCIES
Atlantic Center for the Arts
Crealde School of Art
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS (* denotes solo)
From Crenshaw to Woodward, Scarab Club, Detroit, MI
*I Never Knew/I Always Knew, 80WSE Gallery, New York, NY
S’Long As It’s Yours, Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ
INsideOUT, Atlantic Center for the Arts, New Smyrna Beach, FL
Raw Substance, Art Kitchen, Newark, NJ
Pinup Photofeast, Milk Gallery, New York, NY
Fantasy and Desire, Three Gallery, New York, NY
Friars Lantern, Shelia C. Johnson Design Center, New York, NY
Coney Island, Arnold and Shelia Aronson Hallway, New York, NY
The Artist Book, Adam & Sophie Gimbel Design Library, New York, NY
Departures, Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL
Crealde Artist Show, Alice and William Jenkins Gallery, Winter Park, FL
Beaux Arts, University of Miami, Miami, FL
Florida Artist Series, Datran Center, Miami, FL
AWARDS
Joan Mitchell Foundation Artist Grant
Studio in a School Grant
COLLECTIONS
Southeast Museum of Photography, Daytona Beach, FL
Daytona State College, Daytona Beach, FL
contact
tysonr2@gmail.com