Michael Robinson is a New York-based contemporary artist exploring how signs and symbols shape the ways we understand ourselves and the world around us.

Working across painting, printmaking, photography, sculpture, and installation, he draws from maps, ancient mark-making, typography, digital interfaces, wayfinding, mythology, and divination. He collects, abstracts, and reorganizes these visual languages into recurring glyphs, diagrams, invented alphabets, and speculative maps that move between the familiar, the unreadable, and the intuitive.

These evolving systems form Universus, an ongoing body of work examining how images become icons, icons become symbols, and symbols become emblems of identity, belief, authority, and belonging. The work also considers the power dynamics behind these transformations: who creates symbols, who controls their meaning, and what happens when that meaning is challenged, appropriated, or reclaimed.

Rather than offering fixed narratives, Universus invites viewers to navigate these shifting systems for themselves, exploring how visual language shapes memory, identity, culture, place, and possible futures.