Talks + Panels
The State of Black Artists in San Francisco
Join the 3.9 Art Collective for a panel and discussion hosted at ICA SF during Nexus SF/Bay Area Black Art Week. This conversation will set the groundwork for a research survey the 3.9 Art Collective will conduct in partnership with an established nonpartisan research/data institution that reports to the public about issues and opinions shaping the world today.
Featuring artists Jacqueline Francis, S. Renée Jones, and Trina Michelle Robinson. Moderated by Makeda Best.
With over 25 years of professional experience working in the arts, Makeda Best is currently Deputy Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Oakland Museum of California, where she oversees the Curatorial, Collections, and Production departments. A historian of photography and former curator at the Harvard Art Museums, her exhibitions included Time is Now: Photography and Social Change in James Baldwin’s America, Crossing Lines, Constructing Home: Displacement and Belonging in Contemporary Art, Devour the Land: War and American Landscape Photography Since 1970, and Please Stay Home: Darrell Ellis in Conversation with Leslie Hewitt and Wardell Milan. The catalog for Devour the Land was awarded 2022 Photography Catalogue of the Year by Aperture/Paris Photo. Her most recent exhibition, American Job: 1940-2011, was on view at the International Center for Photography in New York in early 2025. Best has contributed to numerous exhibition catalogs, journals and scholarly publications. She is the author of Elevate the Masses: Alexander Gardner, Photography and Democracy in 19th Century America and co-editor of Conflict and Identity in American Art. She is currently working on several book projects. Best has taught at Harvard University, Tufts University, the University of Vermont, and the California College of the Arts. In addition to serving on many juries, panels, and advisory teams, she is a co-founder and current board member of Museums Moving Forward. She holds a BFA and MFA from CalArts in Studio Photography, and a PhD from Harvard University.
Jacqueline Francis is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012). She is the co-editor of and contributor to two anthologies: Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011), and Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023)—writings and art placed in conversation with the work of the late conceptual artist Lorraine O’Grady. Francis’s curatorial projects include Adia Millett: You Will Be Remembered (Galerie du Monde—Hong Kong; 2022), Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life (Museum of Craft & Design—San Francisco; 2023), and Sargent Claude Johnson (Huntington Art Museum—San Marino, California; 2024). A member of the 3.9 Art Collective since 2012, Francis also is a fiction writer who was awarded an Individual Artist Commission grant (2017) by the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2023 she was named to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts 100—recognition of her cultural activism in the Bay Area. Francis is Dean of the Humanities and Sciences Division at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
S. Renée Jones has been a photographer for more than four decades. She studied Art Therapy with an emphasis in black and white film photography at San Francisco State University. For the past 23 years, she has been working with adults living below the poverty level through San Francisco’s Sixth Street Photography Workshop. Her work has been featured in six solo exhibitions and she has participated in more than a dozen group exhibitions.
Trina Michelle Robinson is a San Francisco–based interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the relationship between memory, migration, and ancestral legacy. Using film, photography, printmaking, installation, and archival materials, Robinson creates emotionally resonant narratives that examine the fractures and recoveries within personal and collective histories.Her practice is rooted in research and somatic engagement, often drawing from her own family’s migration stories and the erasures embedded in historical archives. Robinson repurposes fragments of memory—whether through handmade paper infused with ancestral fibers or glitch-based video techniques—to evoke both trauma and transcendence. Her work invites viewers to reflect on the invisible forces that shape identity and belonging, and to consider how movement, loss, and recovery are shared across generations.Robinson holds an MFA from California College of the Arts and a BA in Political Science from DePaul University. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), ICA San José, Minnesota Street Project, the San Francisco Art Commission Main Gallery, and the BlackStar Film Festival, among others. She is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and was recently nominated for the Anonymous Was A Woman Award.Robinson’s practice offers a powerful lens into the emotional terrain of migration and memory, affirming that art can be a tool for reckoning, release, and reconnection. Through her layered storytelling, she creates space for viewers to engage with histories that are often hidden, yet deeply felt.