| Latest News |
Art Africa Magazine — June 3, 2026
| 2026 |
Teresa Moore, May 5, 2026 — Mission Local
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 St. In “Open Your Eyes to Water,” Robinson presents . . .
Emily Wilson, March 6, 2026 — 7×7
This spring brings a fantastic new season of arts to San Francisco with groundbreaking new exhibitions and performances in every genre. From U.S. debuts like Hong Kong political cartoonist and illustrator Justin Wong at the Chinese Culture Center to creative retellings . . .
Max Blue, February 19, 2026 — KQED
Trina Michelle Robinson is trying to talk to ghosts. For 10 years, the San Francisco-based artist has been on a journey to uncover and share the stories of her ancestors and the legacies of Black Migration. She hasn’t always succeeded — and that’s exactly what makes her work . . .
James Salazar, February 18, 2026 — San Francisco Examiner
A San Francisco artist’s new exhibition aims to help tell the story of the history of Black migration in the U.S. by tracing her own family history. “Open Your Eyes to Water,” currently on view through May 16 at the 500 Capp Street and Root Division’s arts organizations . . .
Staff writer, February 2026 — Art Africa
500 Capp Steet 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 . . .
Max Blue, February 10, 2026 — Hyperallergic
The San Francisco Bay Area is experiencing something of a cultural crisis. For those of us who have lived here long enough, it’s a comparable collapse to what the community experienced during the first dot-com boom. Galleries and arts non-profits are closing in handfuls. Museum programming appears to be pandering to the tech bros. Rent is surging. But if the region’s . . .
| 2025 |
Max Blue, July 24, 2025 — Hyperallergic
I spent a few weeks abroad this summer, and it was a relief to be away from the United States and its deluge of bad news — but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t miss San Francisco and its thriving art scene. If you’re similarly playing catch-up, look no further than this list of exhibitions to visit in the coming weeks. Before summer ends, visit the Ruth Asawa retrospective at . . .
Jessica Zack, June 25, 2025 — San Francisco Chronicle
Cheryl Haines hurried up and down Fort Point’s spiral stone staircases on a recent morning, her trademark blue-and-blond hair whipping in the wind coming off the bay. The founding executive director and chief curator for For-Site was hustling between the second and third . . .
Jaelynn Dale Walls, Summer 2025 — SF/Arts Monthly
If you don’t understand your history, how can you embrace your future?” FOR-SITE curator and founder Cheryl Haines posited this question to me as we wrapped up our discussion on FOR-SITE’s new project, a multi-artist, park-wide installation at Fort Point National Historic Site titled “Black Gold: Stories Untold.” Pointing itself towards history, each installation will . . .
Chadd Scott, June 22, 2025 — Forbes
The most striking temporary venue for contemporary art in America this summer can be found in San Francisco. Fort Point National Historic Site. The only extant Civil War-era fort on the West Coast. Right on the Bay. In the literal shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. The best views inside and out. Inside, visitors find “Black Gold: Stories Untold,” an exhibition featuring . . .
Max Blue, June 16, 2025 — San Francisco Examiner
California history is often thought of as synonymous with the railroad and the gold rush, but Black history is not. “Black Gold: Stories Untold,” a major new exhibition at Fort Point running Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays through Nov. 2, illuminates those lesser-known histories through contemporary art and serves a vital purpose as it does so. FOR-SITE is . . .
Pendarvis Harshaw, June 7, 2025 — KQED
Directly beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, Fort Point’s red brick ceilings and white walls are currently a three-story display of fine art. While the works highlight the golden legacies of African Americans of yesteryear, they wouldn’t be possible without the jewels dropped by the creators of today. “Black Gold: Series Untold” is a free exhibition highlighting the lives of . . .
Hilarie M. Sheets, June 6, 2025 — The Art Newspaper
Poised under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, Fort Point is the only remaining Civil War-era fortification on the West Coast and offers a compelling environment for the exhibition Black Gold: Stories Untold , opening today (until 2 November). Works by 16 contemporary . . .
| 2024 |
Melika Sebihi, October 16, 2024 — Variable West
HERE HERE provides a unique opportunity to observe the varied artistic practices of over twenty faculty and staff members in the School of Art at San Francisco State University, including photographs, textiles, sculpture, and other media. SF State as a workplace unquestionably unites these artists, but themes such as nature, surveillance, identity . . .
Emily Wilson, October 16, 2024 — KQED
In Allegedly the worst is behind us, a group show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, the 12 included artists, many of them living and working in the Bay Area, use their art as an archive of family or community history. Rather than gathering text or statistics, their work . . .
Max Blue, July 23, 2024 — San Francisco Examiner
San Francisco is an often inhospitable city for visual artists to live and work. It’s also birthed major artistic movements and The City is still home to artists whose work reflects their choice to stay. But what sets it apart from the nation’s major art hubs, such as New York and Los Angeles? It is decidedly not a major hub of the art market. In the 1930s, San Francisco was . . .
Sarah Hotchkiss, January 16, 2024 — KQED
The San Francisco Museum of Modern art has announced the names of 16 finalists for their 2024 SECA Art Award. For those unfamiliar with the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (a membership group within the museum), its biennial award process culminates in an SFMOMA exhibition for a handful of Bay Area artists who haven’t previously received . . .
| 2023 |
Amanda Wong, November 27, 2023 — Variable West
As a recurring survey exhibition, Bay Area Now 9 (BAN9) at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts takes on the slippery task of describing today’s zeitgeist. Such an undertaking is made especially challenging at a time as the Bay Area struggles to define its post-pandemic identity in the face of contrarian messaging. For its ninth iteration, curators Fiona Ball and Martin . . .
Mary Corbin, November 21, 2023 — 48hills
Through the doorway of multidisciplinary art, Trina Michelle Robinson is walking toward her past. Sharing personal stories in film, archival materials, and text, the artist explores themes that connect her to her heritage, in order to understand her present . . .
Max Blue, August 17, 2023 — San Francisco Examiner
The recent decision by the Florida Board of Education to whitewash the history of slavery and the oppression of African-Americans in the United States set off a firestorm nationwide, but one San Francisco artist and filmmaker is no stranger to the obfuscation of Black history . . .
Adrian Hernandez, January 24, 2023 — East City Art
Currently on view at MOCA Arlington is their second biennial exhibition Assembly 2022: Time and Attention featuring the work of 12 artists from across the country. They each respond to the issues that have preoccupied many minds since 2020, such as the reimagining of . . .
| 2022 |
Emily Wilson, December 20, 2022 — 48hills
“For us it was a chance basically to build bridges,” said curator Meghan Smith on a walkthrough of “as you summon other worlds“ at Minnesota Street Project through January 28. “Not only between the disciplines at California College of the Arts,” she continued. “But also between . . .
Mark Jenkins, December 9, 2022 — The Washington Post
Most of the figures in Erik Thor Sandberg’s new set of paintings clutch curving strips of some material — whether string, fabric or flesh — as if to steady themselves. That’s probably not what the D.C. fabulist meant when he titled his latest Connersmith show “A Question of Balance.” But the motif is a visual thread that links these fascinating pictures, each executed . . .
Luke Williams, December 1, 2022 — KQED
For Trina Michelle Robinson, it all began when she picked 10 pounds of cotton. Not the pristine puffs available at a fabric store — raw cotton. Still in the boll, with seeds and everything. It’s the kind of cotton her great-great-grandfather’s brother picked on his farm in Oklahoma. It was the type of cotton, along with other cash crops, that several of her ancestors would have picked . . .
Emily Wilson, November 20, 2022 — Hyperallergic
Heesoo Kwon and Trina Michelle Robinson each found their way to art because of their interests in memory and ancestry. Robinson was trying to find out about her distant relatives who had been enslaved in Kentucky, and to make them real people, not just lines in a document. Kwon wanted to create a place where her female ancestors, adversely affected by . . .
January 24, 2022 — Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington
Artists MyLoan Dinh, Priya Suresh Kambli, and Trina Michelle Robinson discuss their work, including their shared interest in familial and cultural history and how it influences their artistic practices in a conversation moderated by Elena Gross, co-director of Berkeley . . .