Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco based visual artist. Her work has been shown at the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, Catharine Clark Gallery, Minnesota Street Project , and New York’s Wassaic Project and is currently included in the prestigious triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work is also included in Paper is People: Decolonizing Global Paper Cultures at San Francisco Center for the Book, a traveling exhibition co-curated by Tia Blassingame and Stephanie Sauer. She had a solo exhibition at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), a Smithsonian Affiliate, as part of their Emerging Artist Program 2022-23. Robinson is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? published earlier this year by CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts and Sternberg Press. She previously worked in print and digital media in production at companies such as The New York Times T Magazine, Vanity Fair and Slack before receiving her M.F.A. from California College of the Arts in 2022.
As a storyteller, she traveled the country and telling the story of exploring her ancestry with The Moth Mainstage at Lincoln Center in New York, in addition to touring with them on stages in San Francisco, Portland, OR, Omaha, NE and Westport, CT. Her story aired on NPR’s The Moth Radio Hour in October 2019. She received her MFA from California College of Arts in Spring 2022.
ARTIST STATEMENT
My artwork explores the relationship between memory and migration using an interdisciplinary approach that includes film, printmaking, installation and archival materials. I want to get to the root of lost memories, especially in relation to migration, whether the move forced or initiated by a search for new opportunities, we all have a migration story in our bloodlines. I study the fragments of memory and repurpose them. The lives of my ancestors are the catalyst behind my artwork and their stories are woven into every detail. Why did they leave? What were they hoping to find? What remains? I want to explore every fracture, fold and glitch to release the trauma that lives inside. I do this using a somatic approach where a focus on materiality is key, whether that is explored by making my own paper using fibers connected to ancestry or creating a glitch in a film to represent release, recovery, imminent loss of a moment in time, or even a glimpse into the future. The act of forgetting is often a mode of self-preservation to keep us moving forward and from falling apart. However, to truly move forward it’s important to do the work to be released from the invisible chains that keep us from truly being free.
I hope viewers find relationship in my work. Migration is something we all have in common at some point in our histories and migrants speak a common language. Each journey is varied, but we are connected by the questions we ask ourselves in that search. Movement is a familiar thread that connects us all.