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Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water
500 Capp Street and Root Division present Open Your Eyes to Water, a solo exhibition of the work of San Francisco-based visual artist Trina Michelle Robinson that spans both venues.
For nearly a decade, Robinson has utilized an embodied, research-based, and multidisciplinary approach rooted in personal and historical archives to create immersive installations that engage ancestry, memory, and the layered geographies of Black migration. Robinson’s interdisciplinary practice moves fluidly across film, printmaking, sound, and installation.
At 500 Capp Street, Robinson will create a living installation tracing her years-long cross-continental engagement with family lineage and movement from Senegal, to Kentucky, Chicago, and California. At Root Division, the artist will re-stage an expanded version of her installation Elegy for Nancy (2022), a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor, a woman named Nancy who was born in 1800s Louisiana and lived in Kentucky with special altar contributions from Bay Area Black women artists, underscoring how collective knowledge, imagination, and care can reframe historical erasure.
About the Artist
Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco-based visual artist. Her work has been exhibited at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, ICA San José, Minnesota Street Project, New York’s Wassaic Project, Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and For-Site’s Black Gold: Stories Untold. Her work is also included in Paper is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures, a traveling exhibition co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer, which was at San Francisco Center for the Book in 2024 and in Atlanta in 2025. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate. Robinson is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and was recently nominated for the 2024 Anonymous Was A Woman (AWAW) Award. Her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book IsNow the Time for Joyous Rage?, published in 2023 by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She received her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.
