January 23, 2025 |6-7 p.m.
Join us for a conversation with artists Trina Michelle Robinson and Tricia Rainwater, alongside political scientist Hakeem Jefferson and curator Matthew Villar Miranda. This panel dives into the profound ways art can reclaim silenced histories and offer pathways toward resilience and healing, as exemplified in Allegedly the Worst is Behind Us, curated by Zoë Latzer and on view at the ICA San José from September 14, 2024, to February 23, 2025.
Trina Michelle Robinson and Tricia Rainwater, featured in the exhibition, bring deeply personal and community-centered approaches to their work. Robinson’s Liberation Through Redaction (2022) and Rammed Earth Pedestal (2024) trace family migration and survival through handmade materials and sound that honor ancestral resilience. Rainwater’s Falamvt ishla chike (2024) is a powerful multimedia installation confronting the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People, weaving memory, language, and activism into a call for justice.
Through a conversation grounded in their artistic practices, the panel will explore critical themes of colonial trauma, migration, and self-determination. What does it mean to carry and rebuild from fractured histories? How can art foster spaces for collective healing and radical change?
This event is free and open to the public.
Learn more about Allegedly the Worst is Behind Us.
Speaker Bios
Trina Michelle Robinson
Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary 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 sharing 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.
Tricia Rainwater
Tricia Rainwater is a Choctaw multimedia artist based in the Bay Area, with roots in the Central Valley and New Mexico. 
Her artistic portfolio, which includes self-portraiture, sculpture, large-scale murals, and installations, has been featured at the Berkeley Center for the Arts, ICA San Francisco, MOCA Toronto, and with Muz Collective, among others. In 2022, she received a grant from the SF Arts Commission to trace the Choctaw Trail of Tears. Rooted in themes of identity and grief, her work offers a perspective through the lens of a Choctaw survivor. Through her art, Tricia confronts and resists loss by revisiting sites of pain, creating spaces for personal and collective healing.
Hakeem Jefferson
Hakeem Jefferson is an assistant professor of political science at Stanford University where he is also a faculty affiliate with the Center for
Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Stanford Center for American Democracy. He received his PhD in political science from the University of Michigan and a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science and African American Studies from the University of South Carolina.
His research focuses primarily on the role identity plays in structuring political attitudes and behaviors in the U.S. He is especially interested in understanding how stigma shapes the politics of Black Americans, particularly as it relates to group members’ support for racialized punitive social policies. In other research projects, he examines the psychological and social roots of the racial divide in Americans’ reactions to officer-involved shootings and works to evaluate the meaningfulness of key political concepts, like ideological identification, among Black Americans.
Matthew Villar Miranda
Matthew Villar Miranda is Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In their former position as Visual Arts Curatorial Fellow at the Walker Art Center, they worked on exhibitions by Julie Mehretu and Paul Chan and exhibitions by Pao Houa Her and Pacita Abad with curator Victoria Sung. They serve on the Board of Stakeholders of Museums Moving Forward (MMF), a Ford and Mellon 
Foundation-funded initiative of an intergenerational, cross-institutional coalition of art museum professionals committed to advancing equity across the museum field. In 2021, they co-curated the Art for Justice Fund-supported exhibition Undoing Time: Art and Histories of Incarceration at the Arizona State University Art Museum (ASUAM). They research queer intimacies and decolonial interventions by artists of the imagined and material tropics with a particular interest in the Austronesian Pacific and its diaspora.
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