A two-venue exhibition in San Francisco traces Black lineage, movement and collective remembrance through installation, film and printmaking.
Trina Michelle Robinson, A still from Transposing Landscapes – A Requiem for Charles Young, 2025. Courtesy of the artist and 500 Capp Street Foundation.
500 Capp Street and Root Division present ‘Open Your Eyes to Water’, a solo exhibition by San Francisco-based visual artist Trina Michelle Robinson. Spanning both venues, the exhibition brings together new works and expanded installations that foreground ancestry, migration and the layered geographies of Black movement across generations.
Robinson’s practice, developed over nearly a decade, is grounded in an embodied, research-driven methodology that draws from personal and historical archives. Working across film, printmaking, sound and installation, she approaches the archive as both evidence and catalyst. Her installations expose the emotional and material strata that official histories often overlook, positioning memory as a living, evolving force rather than a fixed record.
Lineage and cross-continental movement
The exhibition unfolds across two distinct sites, each activating a different dimension of Robinson’s inquiry. At 500 Capp Street, she presents a living installation tracing her family’s movement from Senegal to Kentucky, Chicago and ultimately California. The work reflects an ongoing engagement with lineage, displacement and return, situating personal narrative within broader diasporic histories.
Through layered materials and spatial arrangement, Robinson constructs environments that encourage slow looking and reflection. The exhibition emphasises how migration is not a singular event but an ongoing negotiation between place, memory and inheritance.
‘Elegy for Nancy’ and collective care
At Root Division, Robinson presents an expanded version of Elegy for Nancy (2022), a tribute to her oldest known ancestor, Nancy, born in 1770s Kentucky when the region was still part of Virginia. The installation incorporates altar contributions from Bay Area Black women artists, extending the work beyond biography into collective remembrance.
By inviting communal participation, the exhibition reframes historical erasure through shared knowledge and care. Robinson positions the act of making as both research and ritual, creating space for intergenerational dialogue that resists archival silence.
Experimentation and community across two institutions
The collaboration between 500 Capp Street and Root Division underscores the exhibition’s conceptual framework. 500 Capp Street, the former home and environmental artwork of conceptual artist David Ireland, is dedicated to artistic experimentation and research. Root Division operates as a community-driven visual arts nonprofit focused on education, artist development and public engagement.
Presented across these two contexts, ‘Open Your Eyes to Water’ situates Robinson’s work at the intersection of experimentation and community. The exhibition highlights how institutional space can shape the reception of archival and diasporic narratives, positioning both venues as active participants in the work’s unfolding.
‘Trina Michelle Robinson: Open Your Eyes to Water’ opens at 500 Capp Street and Root Division, San Francisco, on 11 February 2026 and runs until 16 May 2026. For more information, please visit the 500 Capp Street Foundation.
