In the past 10 months multimedia artist Trina Michelle Robinson’s work has been shown all over San Francisco: For-Site’s “Black Gold: Stories Untold” last fall at Fort Point, Recology’s January Artist-in-Residence and through May 16, in a dual-site exhibition, “Open Your Eyes to Water” at Root Division and 500 Capp Street.
In “Open Your Eyes to Water,” Robinson presents a suite of works in which soil and plants figure as prominently as oceans and rivers. Each exhibition space features multi-screen films and installations, including prints or embroidery on paper that Robinson made by hand. History and memory, family and migration, what the hands have made and the body registers are her through lines.
In “Liberation Through Redaction,” a rammed earth lectern standing in a field of dried Kentucky goldenrod and California pampas grass fills the second floor parlor at Capp Street while a soundscape recorded at sites of Robinson’s family migrations murmurs in the background. The goldenrod has a faint, sweet scent. Sheets of handmade paper on the lectern are covered in cursive. “They are replicas that I made of an 1835 will of a man that enslaved many of my ancestors in Kentucky,” Robinson said. Most of the words are embroidered over with coppery stitches – tactile, but illegible, like freshly scabbed tattoos.
“I’m trying to engage people through their senses when they are in that space,” Robinson said. “I want people to embody and maybe have that show trigger some memory of ancestral migration or migration story that’s in their own line.”
I first encountered Robinson’s work in 2022 when she presented “Excavation: Past, Present and the Future” as a fellow in the Museum of the African Diaspora Emerging Artist Program. Then, as now, she was exploring what she could know about her family’s history through the broken archives of chattel slavery, Black people’s connections to the natural world throughout the African diaspora, and the emotional resonance of objects and materials. It is exciting to see how her practice has grown from those early, fertile origins.
Robinson’s life changed dramatically more than a decade ago when, in the process of researching her family genealogy, she purchased a receipt for the sale of one of her ancestors. Her visceral reaction to possessing the document and her obsession with learning everything she could about her people, inspired her to leave New York and her career in media production and become an artist. In 2022 she received her MFA from California College of Arts, where she will continue to teach until it closes in May 2027.
“Elegy for Nancy,” a multi-channel film that was a centerpiece of her 2022 MoAD exhibition, retains pride of place at Root Division. In it, Robinson visits sites in Kentucky and Ohio where her ancestor Nancy lived. We see Robinson awkwardly wading into a body of water in an attempted ritual to honor Nancy’s memory. There is something tender about how earnest and uncomfortable she appears, chest deep in the water, searching for a gesture to reach across time.
For Robinson, who grew up in the Chicago suburbs, that self-consciousness was a real reflection of her journey to experience how our Black ancestors lived with nature. Big nature – forests and oceans and, sometimes, Black men on horses, as in her short “Requiem for Charles Young,” – figures prominently in her films. “My work is very much about being a conversation with the landscape and connecting to the earth and having African Americans reclaim the space that’s we’ve always been a part of in the natural world and the rural landscape in so many ways,” she said.
There’s an unintentionally poignant element to the installation that accompanies “Elegy for Nancy.” “It was an honor for me to have my first solo exhibition and I wanted to bring people with me, especially people who have not had that opportunity of their own yet,” she said. “I invited five other women from CCA to be part of that installation to make things for the altar.”
She was unaware when she brought these other Black women artists into the project, that their alma mater, California College of Arts, would be closing.
Jasmine Narkita Wiley, an MFA student at CCA who has her own indigo vat on campus, taught Robinson how to use the difficult, labor-intensive natural dye that was grown and processed in this country by enslaved Black people.
Robinson related making indigo dye with Wiley to the creative practices of Black people in the Gullah islands: “Her teaching me and the waiting process and just talking and making at the same time, just imagining that’s what women were doing in the Low Country and Geechee communities in South Carolina and Georgia.”
Nicki Shockz sewed the meditation pillows and designed the indigo prints to resemble digital and Super 8 film frames. Ashley Spencer contributed a ceramic cauldron and a strand of large ceramic beads that mirror a string Robinson found in Cameroon. “It was like this ancestral memory she was getting in touch with making those because they were almost identical,” Robinson said.
Lynse Cooper presented a large jar of oranges she had preserved from a tree in her grandparents’ Sacramento yard. Chloe King shared a doll painting. What began as a memorial to ancestors also became a tribute to the California College of the Arts. “It became so much more real, that connection and sense of community when CCA [closing] was announced,” Robinson said. “We can keep each other close and uplift each other and remember the almost 120-year-old history of a brilliant school that’s going to now be gone.’
Perhaps the most compelling aspect of the 500 Capp Street part are the questions and ideas provoked in the basement archive room where Robinson’s ancestral enslavement documents, books and materials are mingled with those of another CCA graduate, David Ireland, the artist who turned his Capp Street house into his greatest art project. .
Aside from Robinson’s artist statement, nothing is labeled in the archive room. The undefined mingling of what mattered to Ireland, a white man who had businesses importing and selling African art and artifacts and organizing safari and photography tours in Kenya, and what matters to Robinson, braids their different experiences of Africa and Europe and America into a third story. Where she begins and he ends is seldom clear. They both collected jars of dirt but whose are whose? I know that hers are from sites in her family history, but what histories do his hold?
Robinson said that a squat shape shrouded in black satin was the preserved stump of an elephant’s leg that Ireland imported to sell as a stool. On a table, near his import store catalog, another black draped packet contains a human femur.
Like Robinson, Ireland, who graduated from CCA in 1953 and died in 2009, was fascinated by the physical potential of objects as mediums.
“We have a lot of similar things in common,” Robinson said. “We’re both avid collectors…We have a connection through our interest in materiality.”
She acknowledged that her revulsion at Ireland’s acquisition of human and animal bones made her question her own use of a pigment made of charred animal bones. “If I’m calling him out for having an elephant leg footstool, what’s the difference between that maybe and me using a bone dried pigment?”
Whose lives matter and how and when? – the questions of this and many an hour.
Alone in the archive, I was literally knocked back when I saw a reference to Robinson’s ancestor Nancy on the second page of her enslaver’s list of earthly possessions, along with his furniture and household goods. My chest hurt when I saw the receipt for the transfer of Nancy’s daughter Ann to another owner. There are leagues between knowing the history and seeing the tiny, neat cursive logging someone’s ancestor as inventory.
“Open Your Eyes to Water,” at 500 Capp Street and Root Division (1131 Mission Street), continues through May 16.
Information about May 8 musical event with singer Joel St. Julien at 500 Capp Street site can be found here. On May 9, 5-7 p.m. PUSH Dance Company will be performing at the Root Division site.
