Robin Cembalest

A Long Island native, Robin studied art history and English at Yale. Her first job was at Artforum, epicenter of downtown cool and French theory. As assistant to the legendary editor Ingrid Sischy, she was secretary, fact-checker, and photo researcher, working on influential stories by Thomas McEvilley, Edit DeAk, Germano Celant, and many more. Robin learned a lot during her four years at Artforum, including the fact that the theoretical space the magazine inhabited was not for her. She wanted to be a news journalist. So she quit her job and moved to Madrid to become a foreign correspondent. 

Robin didn’t know anyone in Spain, or much about the news side of journalism, but eventually she found her way to the English-language service of EFE, the Spanish wire service. She learned how to report and write for a mainstream audience. And when she returned to the U.S. after a year, she covered the transformations in Spain’s cultural scene in her first major articles: “Tradition, a Curse: Punk in a Small Spanish Town,” published in the Village Voice, along with stories on the 1992 World’s Fair in Seville, Salvador Dalí'‘s death and his biographer, hidden Jews and rediscovered Jews, and much more. She finally got to write for Artforum, covering the opening of the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.

Back in New York, she was soon in the art world again—as an associate editor at ARTnews. As an editor, Robin expanded the magazine’s worldwide network of correspondents, developing coverage on global news and trends and managing complex investigations on war loot, restitution, and more. As a reporter and writer, she covered the major cultural events of the early ‘90s—government funding and the Mapplethorpe obscenity trial, the ecological art boom, the growth of the Guggenheim, censorship controversies, multiculturalism, diversity, Native American art, and the transformation of the art museum, among other topics. She won several journalism awards for her 1993 exposé on the Hispanic Society of America, “Change the Board and Get Rid of the Director.” (Most of Robin’s early stories are not online, but you can see a selection of her writing here.)

After leaving ARTnews in 1994, in 1998 Robin returned to become executive editor of the century-old magazine. Over her 16-year run leading the magazine’s editorial department, she greatly expanded the kind of cultural communities ARTnews covered. The content became more global and more diverse, with popular art forms like graphic novels, tattoos, video games, and street art included in the mix. Robin started a paid internship program, mentoring generations of art professionals and helping them build professional and cultural capital. With the interns, Robin launched the magazine’s first original online content and created its social media accounts.

Meanwhile, Robin was making good use of her Spanish-language skills in Latin America and South America, hitting the lecture circuit with her talk “¿Qué es noticia en el arte?”—What makes art news? On her travels, she covered Cuba’s evolving art scene, archeology in Bolivia and Peru, and the latest scholarship around the art made in Spain’s colonies.