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 present an expanded version of Elegy for Nancy (2022)—a tender tribute to her oldest known ancestor, a woman named Nancy who was born in 1770s Kentucky, then still part of Virginia. The installation will feature special altar contributions from Bay Area Black women artists, highlighting how collective knowledge, imagination, and care can reframe historical erasure.