In a two-site exhibition spanning 500 Capp Street and Root Division, the artist explores migration, material memory, and collective authorship – where the archive becomes both evidence and imagination, and water flows as a quiet witness across generations.
In ‘Open Your Eyes to Water’, Trina Michelle Robinson constructs a deeply immersive meditation on lineage, migration, and the fragile work of remembering. Unfolding across two distinct San Francisco sites, the exhibition resists singular narratives – much as the histories it engages do. Through film, printmaking, installation, and material processes rooted in alchemy and care, Robinson navigates the space between what can be recovered and what must be felt into being. In this conversation, she reflects on archives as living entities, water as a connective force, and the collective act of honouring those who came before.
3 June 2026
Suzette Bell- Roberts: ‘Open Your Eyes to Water’ unfolds across two sites, each carrying distinct histories and institutional frameworks. How did you conceive of this spatial doubling as part of the work’s conceptual language, rather than as a logistical expansion of a single exhibition?
Trina Michelle Robinson: The exhibition was originally going to be located at a single site: San Francisco’s arts hub Root Division. However, the curator, PJ Gubatina Policarpio, was discussing the exhibition with Lian Ladia, curator of 500 Capp Street. From that discussion came the idea that a dual-site exhibition could be an interesting way for viewers to experience my work. 500 Capp Street is a Victorian-era house built in 1886 and is also the former home of conceptual artist David Ireland, who purchased it in 1975. He wanted to transform the house into a “living sculpture,” and it indeed is. The site is now a foundation that welcomes research-based artists to show their work in the space, while also giving them access to Ireland’s artwork, in addition to his papers and other materials in the Paule Anglim Archive Room.
My work is rooted in the archive and looks at how the past can inform the present and the future. 500 Capp Street’s Parlour Room seemed to be calling for my installation, Liberation Through Redaction. Both the architecture and purpose of the room ground visitors in domesticity. This, in turn, reminds viewers that the names of my ancestors, mentioned in the handmade redacted will sitting on the rammed earth pedestal, were real, three-dimensional people who not only built and managed households, but also survived an institution meant to destroy them.
David’s artistic interventions of the space bring attention to the home’s history: the preserved cracks in the walls and their ochre colour are reminiscent of a sunset and the colours of the grasses used in my installation tracking the westward migration of my ancestors. The past comes to live in each room in the house. I also have parts of my personal archive on view in their archive room, including original documents dating back to 1835. David and I also both have an interest in collecting objects related to the natural world, such as our soil collections, which sit side-by-side in the archive room while my exhibition is open.
Root Division is an art institution that is centred on community building. Founded in 2002, it houses an affordable art studio program and offers a variety of art classes and professional practice opportunities. It is the ideal location for my installation, Elegy for Nancy. It’s about paying homage to those that came before, and the installation includes an altar with artwork from five other artists: Lynse Cooper, Chloe King, Nicki Shockz, Ashley Spencer and Jasmine Wiley. This collective installation is at the heart of what Root Division is all about.
Your practice often treats the archive as both evidence and a generative force. How do you navigate the tension between what can be recovered through archival research and what must be imagined or felt into being?
My work is largely sourced from the archive as a way of reclaiming narratives and giving a voice to those who have been marginalised or forgotten. Their proof of life exists in the archival documentation I draw from. But to fill the gaps, I turn to my imagination, via speculation, materiality and alchemy. I know that I will never be able to see what my ancestors have seen. I have learned to accept this and use that tension to fuel my attempts to connect to them. For example, I love the intaglio print process, especially photogravure, because etching is a form of markmaking. I use this process to fix the memories I am attempting to revive, so they won’t be lost again. Also, in this process, I take a step back with my photographs by printing them using the intaglio process. The images are no longer the sharp originals. Much like faded memories. I do this film as well. That’s why I love working with analogue film like Super 8 or 16mm. The grain is in conversation with the past or a memory.
The exhibition traces a lineage that moves from Senegal to Kentucky, Chicago and California. How does water function, metaphorically or materially, as a connective tissue across these geographies of Black migration?
Water appears frequently in my work. I refer to it often because it has always been a calming presence in my adult life. So when I started learning about my family history, and the different migration routes involved, I quickly recognised a common thread was water. All of the bodies of water associated with my ancestors’ migration, whether that migration was forced or my choice. The oceans, rivers, lakes, and creeks. Those bodies of water, I feel, were the soothing force in the lives of my ancestors during each move. When water appears in my work, I am looking for that same meditative feeling, and hope that it also soothes the viewer.
In the expanded Elegy for Nancy, you invite contributions to the altar from other Black women artists. How does this gesture shift authorship, and what does it mean to hold ancestry as a collective, rather than singular, responsibility?
For the installation of Elegy for Nancy, I really felt that collaboration and working as a collective was necessary. This piece, I now realise, was never just about me. The presence of an altar is an invitation for others to collectively share, grieve, celebrate and remember. It became important that several people come together to pay homage to those who came before, so a multitude of women could be remembered. Especially as Black women. There was this lovely, quiet power in us coming together, especially because the women involved also have a shared history of getting our MFA’s at the same art school: California College of the Arts in San Francisco. We all came to the school in search of finding deeper meaning in our quest to create, plus we were all working with lineage in some way. The pieces on the altar are offerings, in addition to a lovely conversation on gratitude for those who came before us.
Your installations are often described as “living,” resisting fixity. How do you think about time within the exhibition, particularly in relation to memory as something active, unstable, and continuously unfolding?
In my work, time is definitely something I am trying to manipulate, bend or trace. I feel I can capture glimpses of my ancestors, the past, or future, in my work because I consider many of my processes forms of alchemy. Using alchemy to transform dried palm fronds into paper, or using a film light leak overlay to traverse or bend time. In my installation Liberation Through Redaction, working with the newly foraged and dried grasses, I can continue to watch them transform, witness slight changes in colour, and notice a more earthy scent. The soundscape adds another component to the immersive installation that hopefully transports the viewer. Maybe it can trigger a memory in their own lineage. One of my favourite things is when a viewer tells me their own family migration story, and they remember when viewing my work. Or a revived memory. For me, I need to believe I can connect to my ancestors for whatever seemingly desperate reason. I want to revive them. I want to get close to them, and this is my attempt.
Across film, printmaking, sound and installation, your work resists medium specificity. How do you determine the form a particular fragment of history or memory should take?
I consider myself an interdisciplinary artist because I consider each medium a language, and some ideas are better expressed using a particular medium, while at the same time, the different artworks are in conversation with one another. The decision to use a particular medium is generally intuitive. For example, I often use film so viewers can witness and experience the moments a memory is fractured. I do this via a visible glitch or disruption of some kind in the footage. For example, in my film Elegy for Nancy, my body is glitching in a scene as I kneel beside a river to signify my strained attempt to connect with the past and manipulate the passage of time. Another example is when I create installations to immerse viewers in a world where they are wrapped in a particular moment on a multisensory level, like in my installation Liberation Through Redaction. In this installation, audiences experience the work through sight, scent and sound in the hope that they can experience my work on multiple levels and ideally somatically.
There is a palpable attention to materiality, from handmade paper to soil-based inks. How do these processes operate as forms of embodiment, especially when engaging histories marked by erasure and displacement?
My focus on materiality allows me to experience my ancestors through the senses. I lack an abundance of family photos, heirlooms and stories tracing my family history, therefore materiality and the gestures of working with the materials are how I connect to my ancestry. This is also a form of alchemy. When I go through the long, laborious process of creating sheets of paper using fibres connected to my ancestry, such as palm fronds from Cameroon, or using soil I collected in Senegal to make ink, I am getting to know my family members that came before me on an intimate level. I can only create my artwork with this focus on materiality because I am truly desperate to connect to my past and learn more about who I am. I feel so much more whole since incorporating these practices into my life. It’s really changed me and how I see my place in the world.
The exhibition suggests that migration is not a singular event but an ongoing negotiation between place, inheritance and return. How has moving through these geographies reshaped your understanding of belonging, both personally and in your work?
In my exploration of migration, I have learned that it is often driven by a constant curiosity, when it’s not a mode of absolute survival. In my work, I am asking: Why did they leave? Did they find what they were looking for? What does freedom feel, sound, taste, smell and look like? So yes, in asking these questions, migration for me and so many others is cyclical, even if that migratory movement and return happen over the course of multiple generations. For many, far removed from their ancestors’ place of origin, there is a curiosity of “going home” again. To know their lineage in a deeper way. Especially when some people tell you that you have no real past. That the violence your people survived, in my case, my ancestors’ enslavement, is impossible to overcome or pass through, and you must exist in some sort of void. For many, if you have the opportunity to push through the hell your ancestors survived, so you can catch a glimpse of the glory that came before, which is why I travelled to Senegal, Gambia and Cameroon, and to also see that your ancestors were always free in their minds when being held in bondage once they arrived on this continent, then that work must be done. That is what my life is now. I understand those who were too close to the violence must often look away and forget in order to survive. I, however, am ready to do the work, generations later, in order to be released from the invisible changes that keep me from truly being free. I feel like a completely different person. So different from the person I was before I started doing this work.
This exhibition was on view at 500 Capp Street and Root Division in San Francisco, and closed on 16 May 2026.
