Venue: Root Division
MAIN GALLERY
Artist Talk and Panel Conversation moderated by Elena Gross
Join us for an intimate conversation with artist Trina Michelle Robinson along with collaborators Ashley Spencer, Chloe King, Jasmine Narkita Wiley and Lynse Cooper, moderated by writer and curator Elena Gross. At Root Division, Robinson presents an expanded version of Elegy for Nancy (2022) — a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor. This immersive installation includes special contributions from fellow Bay Area artists, highlighting how collective knowledge, imagination, and care can reframe historical erasure. Open Your Eyes to Water is a two-site solo exhibition that spans 500 Capp Street and Root Division.
PANELISTS
Ashley Spencer is an interdisciplinary artist and writer whose work reflects her perspective as a black queer creator. With ten years of experience in ceramics, sculpture, and mixed media, her art delves into complex themes like the black experience, hauntology, and inheritance. She addresses generational grief through her work, which often uses a blend of various mediums to explore time and material history. Ashley initiates thinking about how the work is as much about the process as the final product, inviting viewers to engage with both contemporary issues and historical narratives.The materials she uses become tools for storytelling, rituals, and manifestations of folklore, weaving narratives that speak of heritage, beliefs, and the unseen. The act of arranging and rearranging such materials can also be seen as a dialogue with spirits and tales that hover just at the edge of perception. Every twist of a twig or coil of hair echoes with the voices of ancestors, myths, and legends, enriching the present with their whispers. Through them, she engages with a legacy that is living and breathing, inviting us to explore the enchanted and the unknown.
Chloe King (b. 1999, Oakland, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, photography, and installation. Their work investigates queer experiences of pleasure, power, and perception through materially driven, image-based compositions rooted in nightlife culture. Drawing on their lived experience as a mixed-race queer womxn working within club environments, King constructs layered visual worlds that move between glamour, distortion, and collapse. King received a B.F.A. from Cornish College of the Arts in 2021 and is currently pursuing an M.F.A. at California College of the Arts. Her residency experience includes ARTS at King Street Station (2021), Specialist Gallery (2020), and Chautauqua School of Art (2020). King has participated in numerous exhibitions, such as No Way to See Inside For Certain at SOIL Art Gallery (2022), Public Dreams of Fractured Futures at Wa Na Wari (2022), and the Cornish 2021 BFA Exhibition at 9th Ave Gallery.
Elena Gross (she/they) is the Director of Exhibitions & Public Programs at the GLBT Historical Society and an independent writer and curator living in Oakland, CA. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists and most recently in queer artistic and literary histories of the late 20th century. Elena is the co-editor, along with Julie R. Enszer, of OutWrite: The Speeches that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture (Rutgers University Press), winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Anthologies.
Jasmine Narkita Wiley is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator who creates mixed media installations, participatory art, and works on paper that explore beinghood, the gaze, and dark sousveillance. She has presented her work at ICA San Francisco, MCA Denver, and BMoCA, among others. Her writing has appeared in College Art Association’s Art Journal Open, Surface Design Journal, and Rewind Review Respond. Her awards include: Ted Purves Social Practice Award from CCA, Cadogan Scholarship from the San Francisco Foundation, HEAR US Award from the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research. She earned her MA in Arts Politics from NYU Tisch and is currently pursuing a MFA in Fine Arts at CCA.
Lynse A. Cooper (b. 1993) is an artist working primarily in photography. Her work concentrates on themes of death & grief, decay & preservation, loss, isolation, and memory. Her practice is often a way to honor, revere, or memorialize those most important to her. She is a 2023 Cadogan awardee from the San Francisco Foundation and a 2024 Barclay Simpson Scholarship recipient from California College of the Arts. She was included in Root Division’s Introductions 2023 and SF Camerawork’s FORECAST 2024 as the recipient of the Juror’s prize. She has shown work at Slash Art in San Francisco and the Berkeley Art Center. She was also a member of the summer 2025 cohort of the Interdisciplinary Writers Lab at Kearny Street Workshop in San Francisco. She earned her MFA from CCA’s Graduate Fine Arts program in May of 2024.
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 Is Now 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.
FRANK RATCHYE PROJECT SPACE
Erik Barrios-Recendez: Betwixt and Between
Betwixt and Between confronts the social apparatus that determines one’s ability to survive. Categories of identity such as class, race, and gender shape social hierarchies and influence the perception of individual merit. What happens when inherited understandings of labor and worth collide with the realities of surviving? Actively preserving significant imagery of protest, San Francisco counter-culture, and the queer community, artist Erik Barrios-Recendez uses collage to fuse together layers that replicate the many parts that exist within dictating social systems. In this new body of work, Barrios-Recendez reflects on the emotions that surface from resisting social structures, and from confronting the reality of his existence in a queer Latino body.