My grandmother was a maid, so there's a place in my heart for women who spent the best years of their lives creating home in other people's houses.

But my Meme was one of the lucky ones, Joey Robinson told me. She was white, and from Europe, so she faced few of the hardships and carried none of the hard history that black maids couldn't escape.

We stood among them in a second-floor gallery of the Art Institute of Seattle the other day. Robinson's "Black Maids Tribute" is 28 acrylic portraits: round and dark, bandannaed and bare, mouths open, mouths blocked.

The maids kept houses and kept secrets, cleared tables and cleared a path for the generations that followed.

"These women were a portal to the racial divide," Robinson said. "To letting whites know that they wanted families, education ... everything that they had but blacks couldn't have."

The show runs through Feb. 24 and is a worthy stop during this, Black History Month.

When not painting, Robinson, 44, works as an administrator in the Bellevue office of the Perkins Coie law firm.

In his 1,200-square-foot studio apartment on Seattle's First Hill, he researched and painted the maids for more than a year. The show opened on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

"They talked to me," he said. "They are not pretty paintings, and they are not pretty stories."

There is Hattie McDaniel, who won an Oscar for her role as Mammy in 1939's "Gone with the Wind" — but whose color banned her from the film's Atlanta premiere.

There are the real-life maids: Lena Baker, who killed her white employer and was tried, convicted and sentenced to death in one day. She was hardly innocent — she and her employer were hard-drinking lovers before she shot him.

But as a black servant, Lena knew better than to try to beg the all-white, all-male jury in Georgia for leniency.

She wore a shabby scarf in her mug shot; on canvas, Robinson gave her a colorful one.

Lois Spellman, a maid who lived above Robinson in the Hayes Homes projects in Newark and was a widow with 10 children, was shot during the 1967 race riots by National Guardsmen who mistook her for a sniper, Robinson said.

"She had a grace about her," he said. So in his portrait she wears a crown.

Robinson included four maids representing "The Eleanor Club," named for first lady Eleanor Roosevelt by former FBI head J. Edgar Hoover, who believed there was an organized group of radical maids who insisted on sitting at their employers' tables.

Robinson wants to continue his maids project, and perhaps travel to Mississippi to research and paint the late Oseola McCarty, a washerwoman who left $150,000 in scholarship money to the University of Southern Mississippi in 1995.

Her gift brought her fame and travel, but in every hotel where she stayed McCarty made her own bed.

"She," Robinson said, "is on my list."

Nicole Brodeur's column appears Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday. Reach her at 206-464-2334 or nbrodeur@seattletimes.com. She can smell the roast chicken.