In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with film and video artist Trina Robinson.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with film and video artist Trina Robinson.
About Artist Trina Robinson:
Trina Michelle Robinson explores the relationship between memory and migration through film, print media and archival materials. She wants 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. She studies the fragments of memory and repurposes them. The lives of her ancestors are the catalyst behind her artwork and their stories are woven into every detail. Why did they leave? What were they hoping to find? What remains? She wants to explore every fracture, fold and glitch to release the trauma that lives inside. Her work has been shown at galleries and film festivals throughout the country including including the BlackStar Film Festival in Philadelphia, the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) - a Smithsonian affiliate, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, Southern Exposure and Root Division in San Francisco, and New York’s Wassaic Project.
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.
Her earlier written work was featured in the Museum of the African Diaspora’s I’ve Known Rivers Project, and New Jersey Dramatists Which Way to America at the Jersey City Museum and Puffin Cultural Forum. She has worked in production in print and digital media for companies such as The New York Times, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, California Sunday Magazine and Slack, in addition to working as a teaching artist with Women’s Project and Productions in New York.
She has been invited to be a speaker or guest teacher at multiple conferences, colleges and high school campuses, including the being the keynote speaker at the 2021 Oregon Heritage Conference, 2019 Kentucky Borderlands Conference, Feminist Border Arts Film Festival at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, N.M., and Design Tech High School in Redwood City, C.A. In addition to discussing her research and approach to storytelling, she also enjoys discussing the importance of raising marginalized voices and how to mindfully create a diverse and inclusive environment at her speaking and teaching engagements.
Trina was included in the Museum of the African Diaspora’s (MoAD) Emerging Artist Program 2022-2023, and had a solo exhibition in October 2022.
Visit Trina's Website: TrinaRobsinos.com
Follow Trina on Instagram: @Trina_M_Robinson
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-09-25 - AIA - EP010 - Trina Robinson
Artist Trina Robinson: [00:00:00] And I think that's just like the magic of becoming an artist. I was trying to include a lot that I thought that people wanted to hear, but there was not that emotional tie that would bring people. It was more of me just like talking at people. But once I made that video and I actually was able to story and synthesize the information, I think I was just able to articulate myself so much better and have other people be able to see themselves.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Trina Robinson on using video to tell her story.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hard working artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area. And I wanted people to know about them.
So I came up With Art is Awesome.
Trina Michelle Robinson uses photos and video installation to explore her ancestry and heritage. I first saw her work in excavation past, present, and future at the museum of the African diaspora. And it floored me with how evocative and moving it was. The show included photos Trina took in Senegal related to our ancestors forced migration from West Africa and ones taken in places where her great great grandfather and her great great great grandfather survived enslavement in Kentucky. Those personal photos had a personal connection. They were printed on paper Trina made out of cotton from a Black owned farm. There was also an altar and the short film Elegy for Nancy made for her oldest female ancestor.
Now Trina, who [00:02:00] has a background in political science and publishing, is a full time artist. work at Berkley's Kala Institute, San Francisco's Catherine Clark Gallery, Roots Division, and the Minnesota Street Project. Trina is one of the artists included in Bay Area Now, opening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on October 6th.
At her Minnesota Street Center. Studio where you can occasionally hear another artist working in the woodshop. Trina talked about connecting with people through art and the story that changed her life. Trina's mom grew up in the South side of Chicago. There had been a flood in the basement of their house when she was growing up and they stored some things in the neighbor's house.
When those neighbors cleaned out their attic, they found items that belonged to Trina's family.
Artist Trina Robinson: The photo album had all these really old photos from like [00:03:00] the twenties and thirties and forties. And it also had these newspaper clippings. And then one of them talked about an ancestor of mine my mom never even had heard of, but she knew about all of his siblings.
But his story got buried basically about how he was passing for white. And that was a wild story. And that had a bunch of information in it. And it gave us clues to our past and then just started doing some research. It just total door opened up into our ancestry in Kentucky, specifically.
Host Emily Wilson: In 2019, Trina went to Kentucky and started researching and documenting what she found.
Artist Trina Robinson: When I went to visit where my ancestors were enslaved, I got a Zeiss lens for my iPhone. At that time it was like the iPhone five or something. And they, they weren't as souped up as they are now. So I bought like a Zeiss lens attachment for my phone just so I can document it and get like better footage.
Host Emily Wilson: Trina wanted to tell her story on The Moth, which has live storytelling events that can also be heard [00:04:00] on the radio and on a popular podcast. She called their pitch line and heard back six months later.
Artist Trina Robinson: She was saying at first, I don't think you have the story yet. It seems like you're still looking. And she kind of disappeared.
And then I sent her film. I took a film class and I sent her a version of the film I had made. The video essay is like three minutes. And then she called me, we started talking again. She's like, now you got it. You, and it took me making that video for me to be able to process what I had. been collecting because it was overwhelming just trying to process the whole history of enslavement, my family's involvement, looking at my ancestors names on these like documents, property records, and understanding intellectually and emotionally what that means and how troubling that is.
I wasn't able to really process it until I found a visual artistic form talking about the work.
Host Emily Wilson: This convinced Trina to continue making videos.
Artist Trina Robinson: And I think that's just like the magic of becoming an [00:05:00] artist. Like I said, I had this information, like 15 plus years of documentation, and I, it was very overwhelming and I couldn't put into words really, there was just so much.
There were so many stories, I think. I was trying to include a lot that I thought that people wanted to hear, but there was not that emotional tie that would bring people. It was more me just like telling, talking at people. But once I made that video and I actually was able to story and synthesize the information, well, it helped me articulate in some way, like what I had been discovering and also my ancestor's lives and why I was wanting to learn the info and share it with others.
I think I was just able to articulate myself so much better and have other people be able to see themselves.
Host Emily Wilson: Trina's first show was at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan. She walked onto the stage in front of a huge audience that was totally silent. She says she got through it by reminding herself she was doing it for her ancestors.
And she felt like they were there with her. She went [00:06:00] on to tell her story in four more cities.
Artist Trina Robinson: What I really loved is that finally being able to name my ancestors and to be able to have people have, uh, share these stories of marginalized people, people whose names were erased and weren't looked at as real people, be able to have their names, have people see their worth and be able to be on these incredible stages, especially the Lincoln Center and have them be the center of the world for the first time.
Host Emily Wilson: People shared their own stories with her.
Artist Trina Robinson: I think, though, the best part was at the end when people came to talk to you and they wanted to connect to you and tell you their personal story, no matter what their background was. They, again, would see themselves in how I told my story and would tell me about their family's migration story.
Host Emily Wilson: Trini grew up in Oak Park, Illinois, in a politically active family, and that influenced her and her work, she says. Her mother was a teacher in Chicago, and her father was a principal who tried to get a school named after Nat Turner, the enslaved preacher who led a [00:07:00] rebellion. Trina studied political science at college and went into publishing at the New Yorker and then Vanity Fair.
Trina came to San Francisco to work with a California Sunday magazine and then got recruited to work on Slack's editorial team. She was eventually laid off, but first they went public. She decided to use the money from Slack to go to the California College of the Arts. Her film had done well at festivals and she wanted to make
Artist Trina Robinson: more.
I think I found what I'm good at and I love to be able to tell stories in that way and lift up these voices. I'm going to make a documentary and I tried to make a documentary. I'm like, Oh my God, this is really hard because I have no skills. So that's when I decided to go to grad school, but I didn't want to go to film school.
I wanted to go to interdisciplinary program because I also had a print background working in magazine publishing. So I wanted to also study printmaking so I can get the manual. So those are my two main focuses, film and printmaking. And so I was able [00:08:00] to work on both of those at CCA. What she learned
Host Emily Wilson: at CCA has had a big effect on her work, Trina says.
And it helped her go deeper and understand better what she was doing.
Artist Trina Robinson: I'm obsessed with the glitch in that first video I made, which is really rough. I got a lot of attention because there's portions of it where I'm like glitching the screen. Those moments are happening when this woman is trying to intentionally forget as she's migrating north.
She's trying to forget her life, her Uh, her family's enslaved past in Kentucky and she's moving, migrating, crossing the river, the Ohio River from Kentucky to Ohio, and then eventually Chicago, my family's migration route. She's intentionally leaving that behind. So the screen is glitching. I'm obsessed with that idea.
And when I went to grad school, you know, I had many incredible instructors who were all working artists. One of them though, Sam Vernon suggests some incredible books for me to read, including Glitch Feminism. That book changed my life because it helped me articulate completely why I'm looking to the glitch to articulate [00:09:00] my vision.
I'm looking for fractures and trying to mine those like spaces and trying to fill those empty spaces.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, three questions, where I asked the artists the same three questions to learn a little more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What work made an impression on you and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Trina Robinson: I knew I was an artist when people were able to see themselves in my work. That is why I wanted to tell these stories. So when I got people from all backgrounds coming to me, Either through storytelling, especially through the films, it showed me that, oh, training, okay, you're onto something, you're doing this right.
And like, people are connecting to you. Talking about messages or issues through art is a very great way to disarm people and to see [00:10:00] themselves and see other people's stories in a way that you can't. Do otherwise. And so I think that's when I knew when people saw themselves,
the one artwork that really resonates with me as I was living in New York. And I remember seeing, I'm forgetting the name of the exhibition, but it was Kara Walker things that they're at the Whitney or was at MoMA. It was like 2007, 2008. And it was like kind of like a retrospective on her work. I'd heard of her, you know, I think I've been reading about her and this show was getting a lot of attention.
It was in the news. They went. And there's this one room that was just filled with the silhouettes and my heart just stopped and I just was Incredibly overwhelmed and it was just I didn't know what was going on But now I recognize like I was having like some generational memory moment, I think, because it felt like I had seen this before or had been there.
This took me like a couple years to articulate what would happen to me, but I know I was incredibly overwhelmed and got emotional [00:11:00] and cried a little bit and sat there forever. I was there forever. And I now recognize like that was the beginning of what led me to become an artist because it's about when people are living through my ancestors or anyone are living through a traumatic moment.
They have to do what they can and to kind of survive and they kind of shut down a little bit just to keep going. That show gave me the opportunity to be able to finally start releasing and recognizing and like working through that trauma, that generational trauma and getting it out of my body.
The most creatively inspiring for me is definitely the Presidio. Um, it's actually one of the reasons I moved here. Um, it's not just inspiring because it's so beautiful because you can kind of recharge, but it's also very much connected to my family history. I had an ancestor. Actually, my uncle was stationed there in the 80s, but then I had an ancestor who that newspaper article was about, [00:12:00] about, um, who was passing the one who was forgotten in our family story.
He's actually buried there. He was stationed there for a long time and he died in 1932. He was actually not stationed here anymore. He was back visiting. He died and was buried there. And I look at him as my partner in my art practice because he's the one. Who's story led to everything else and helps completely change the trajectory of my life.
Host Emily Wilson: Thanks for listening. And thanks to our guest, Trina Michelle Robinson. Trina is one of the artists featured in the Bay Area Now exhibition at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The show opens on October 6th and is on view through next May. Please subscribe and join us next time when we talk with Adia Millet, an artist who works in glass, collage, textiles, painting, and miniatures. Her show, Wisdom [00:13:00] Keepers, inspired by the quilts at the Berkeley Art Museum, is at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Jose, through February 18th. Adia will also have a solo show. At San Francisco's Haynes Gallery in January.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.
Till next time.[00:14:00]