Home and Away
Curated by the 3.9 Art Collective
Featuring work by Jacqueline Francis, S. Reneé Jones, & Trina Michelle Robinson
On View: June 18 - July 27, 2024
Nightly projections by Trina Michelle Robinson in TLM’s Eddy St. windows sundown to midnight throughout the show’s run
Public Program “The TL: The Beating Heart of San Francisco” on June 20, 2024 6-8pm
In conjunction with the Juneteenth holiday, 3.9 Art Collective, an association of San Francisco based African American artists and intellectuals who came together to draw attention to the city’s dwindling Black population, share an exhibit and related public program that explore place-making as a process.
The work in this exhibition is about making place as a process explored by members of the 3.9 Art Collective. In the black and white photographs of S. Renée Jones, a San Francisco native, the city’s poetic energies shine forward in proud portraits, quiet landscapes, and documents of celebrations and everyday activities. Trina Michelle Robinson’s haunting photographs reproduced on handmade paper and similarly affecting video and film consider histories of migration, including her resettlement in San Francisco. A research writer with more questions than answers, Jacqueline Francis offers text responding to Jones’ and Robinson’s images: conjoined words and pictures about the nature of home and being away from it will be projected in the Tenderloin Museum’s windows for the passerby’s consideration.
About the 3.9 Art Collective:
The 3.9 Art Collective is an association of African American artists, curators, and art writers who live in San Francisco, and came together to draw attention to the city’s dwindling black population. The 3.9 Art Collective bears witness to this phenomenon and seeks to reverse it by drawing attention to the historical and ongoing presence of black artists in the city and creative expression in its black communities. Through multiple forms of presentation and outreach, we create and claim spaces to display our art work; nurture young artists and develop educational programs for students; and write about and curate exhibitions meant to generate productive, cross-cultural dialogues. For more information on the 3.9 Art Collective, follow them online, and on Instagram and Facebook.
About the artists:
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, including their current exhibition Praxis of Local Knowledge, Minnesota Street Project, Catharine Clark Gallery, and New York’s Wassaic Project and the prestigious triennial Bay Area Now 9 at Yerba Buena Center for Fine Arts. 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, is a 2024 SFMoMA SECA Finalist and her print series Ghost Prints of Loss is included in the book Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? was published in 2023 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.
S. Renée Jones has been creating images for more than 40 years. She grew up in San Francisco's Mission District with nine brothers and sisters–all raised by a single parent father. She was among the youngest of the siblings, which caused an unusual kind of isolation. That's where photography came in. Playing around with a camera (minus film for the longest time) allowed her to hide when she needed to and to be the center of everything when she wanted to do that. Struggling through the reality of her life with an absent mother, the constant penetration of racism, sexism, and poverty into everyday experience, and the resulting burden of low self-esteem, she looked toward photography as therapy. She learned to pay close attention to what mattered–to what told the story. She asks herself when creating an image: What brings pleasure to my eyes? What causes my soul to connect and gather in that which surrounds me? What moves beyond mimicry, the splash of color. or visual trickery? What will lead me to my next moment of healing?
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)—scholarly essays devoted to the twentieth-century artist, author and curator—and Is Now the Time for Joyous Rage? (2023)—writings and art placed in conversation with the work of contemporary 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 Professor of Art History and Visual Culture and Dean of the Humanities and Sciences Division at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.