In one of her Instagram posts, multimedia artist Tricia Rainwater stands inside a picnic shelter at Cadron Settlement Park in Cadron, Arkansas.
She wears a red plaid dress and black laced-up boots, with some of her tattoos visible on her legs and left hand. Her long, dark hair frames her face, and large hoops hang from her earlobes.
She’s looking directly at her camera’s lens, her brown eyes windows to a deep soul and complexities.
Rainwater, a mixed Choctaw, Indigiqueer femme, spent September 2022 traveling the Choctaw route of the Trail of Tears, retracing the steps of her ancestors. In the 1830s, the Choctaw people and other Indigenous nations were forcibly removed from Deep South states, including Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma.
“I had started to have dreams where I was traveling through Mississippi – where my grandmother was from – and I was like, ‘What if I just rent a car and travel it [i.e., the Trail of Tears] and photograph myself the way I do at home?’” Rainwater said in a Zoom video call with the Bay Area Reporter.
After being awarded a $20,000 SF Artist grant by the San Francisco Arts Commission to fund her project idea, she spent six months researching and combing through historical archives, reaching out to the Choctaw Nation for guidance.
Her documentation of her journey included photos of her homelands and herself at notable sites, journaling, collecting soil from the trail in Ziploc bags, and posting on her Instagram page, such as about her stop in Cadron.
It was a means for her to process the past, heal in the present, and continue building an archive of her personal and cultural histories.
“My Indigiqueerness – my being Native and queer – feels like it factors into everything. It definitely is the lens I make my art through,” she said.
All things considered
Rainwater’s Instagram page is a multiyear-spanning account of someone who has repeatedly met hardships head-on, at times taking a step back in order to reassess and then progress.
Chock-full of rawness and vulnerability, her posts have the potential to intimidate viewers with their boldness, while also conjuring empathy.
The same is the case with her art.
“Work like mine shines a light on lives that people often look away from. When they’re in a gallery and they're viewing my photos, they have to sit with it. I get to be in control of the narrative, and they have to look at what I want them to look at,” she said.
Rainwater, 40, has lived in San Francisco for 17 years, with the overwhelming majority of that time devoted to her art practice. She’s in a good place right now, she said, able to expend energy and effort toward her photography and other projects while also holding down a remote gig at a tech company (the name of which she did not disclose).
“I tell everyone that I have two full-time jobs, and it truly feels like that. … They compete at times, but that's just the creative hustle in San Francisco,” she said.
Every artist has their origin story about a particular moment when it became clear that art was their calling. For Rainwater, it was taking photographs of nature during childhood, using cameras her parents had gifted her, and then showing her work at the Lodi Grape and Wine Festival in California’s Central Valley.
“I would enter my photographs – these very cute ones of me looking up at trees through the branches. It felt so cool that I had this original idea. And when I started getting ribbons, I was like, ‘Oh, I have something. This is something,’” Rainwater said.
She stuck with it, taking more scenic photos, as well as photos of her family and herself. When she moved to San Francisco in her early 20s, the latter took on a new purpose.
“I realized how much trauma I had from childhood and that I needed to process it. That began the journey of self-portraiture, where I was photographing my emotions and realizing all I needed to process externally in therapy. And I continued that for years, and it really helped me. It still does,” Rainwater said.
Facing the camera’s lens
Self-portraits became Rainwater’s way of confronting and healing from difficult times, such as her father’s alleged abusiveness (she has cut off contact with him) and her mother’s long battle with kidney and heart failure and death in 2016.
In the photograph “Aftermath,” which is viewable on her Instagram page, she stands in her mother’s narrow kitchen in a black dress and black boots. She gazes solemnly at the camera, holding a bouquet of flowers; similar floral arrangements rest on the countertops.
“Her death was really, really hard and really impacted my work. I photographed all the objects in her house as I was clearing it out. It was very emotional, but felt very important,” Rainwater said.
Several years later, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, with the shelter-in-place mandate, face-mask requirement, six-feet-apart social distancing, and the virus itself affecting everyone in some way. Rainwater and her then-spouse found some relief walking in Golden Gate Park with their dogs.
She brought along her vintage Nikon D60 camera and captured shots of herself within the park’s vast forest – sometimes standing openly, surrounded by trees; other times her face or body partially obscured by branches and shrubbery.
“I was processing all these emotions around family getting sick and dying and working in a place I was unhappy. And so going into Golden Gate Park and escaping into the woods – making these beautiful photographs where I was evoking these emotions and getting back into nature – felt very healing for me,” she said.
Rainwater was not quite out of the woods – or park – when COVID-19 restrictions somewhat lessened, as the time period also proved to be a wakeup call about her marriage.
“I think I was one of those people when I was in the pandemic who felt like my marriage had had a resurgence and it was going to be fine. And then it hit me, when the pandemic started to ease a bit. I was like, ‘Oh shit, I'm really unhappy.’”
The dissolution of her 11-year relationship spurred her back into wanting to confront the challenging aspects of her life.
In one of her self-portraits from this period, “The Long Goodbye” (2021), Rainwater, perceivably distraught, sits on the bed she had shared with her ex; moving boxes are stacked on the floor. In another, titled “How it all ends up” (2021), her mouth is agape and her wedding rings rest on her tongue.
“I turned the camera on myself,” she said. “Things that I think some people have considered really melodramatic felt really empowering to me.”
A lasting impact
In another Instagram post, Rainwater stands in Joaquin Miller Park in Oakland, wearing a black top, denim skirt, and boots. She stares into the camera’s lens, her facial expression stoic yet mournful, as she holds a plastic bag with both hands, close to her chest. She brought back the soil she retrieved from the Trail of Tears to the Bay Area, to her home.
The photograph, titled “Military Road Meets Joaquin Miller” (2024), was featured in the exhibition “Falama: To Return” at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Kija Lucas, CIIS curator for the arts, noted that Rainwater’s art is unique.
“Tricia’s work is incredibly brave and vulnerable. She is her whole self in these portraits, holding the land in her hands, and the stories of her ancestors in her blood. The portraits ask the viewer to look at her, and consider the weight of generations that she carries with her. They are quiet and direct, stern and soft all at once,” Lucas, an ally, wrote in an email to the B.A.R.
Since receiving the SFA grant and completing her Trail of Tears project, Rainwater’s found that more gallery and institution doors have opened for her.
“I think people see that I can make the work. And now they're like, ‘Tricia, come work with us.’ I've been at this for 16 years, and there really is a level of having to prove that you're going to make the work and show up,” she said.
Rainwater continues to center on self-portraiture but has expanded her portfolio more so in recent years, such as with sculpture work, large-scale installations, and murals.
In the “Allegedly the worst is behind us” exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José, she showcased her work “Falamvt ishla chike” (2024), which explores the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls, and Two-Spirit (MMIWG2S) people.
“In a media landscape where Indigenous lives are too often erased or reduced to statistics, Tricia Rainwater’s work stands out as an act of radical archiving,” wrote Zoë Latzer, ICA San José’s curator and director of public programs, in an email to the B.A.R.
The immersive installation features a mural of Facebook-sourced “missing person” posters of MMIWG2S people and four wooden mobiles with fabric ribbons, representing the life of each person and the connection between generations, and metal jingles, symbolizing loss. Rainwater’s voice can be heard repeating the Choctaw phrase, “Falamvt ishla chike” (a wish for someone to return) and saying the names of those missing.
“She carefully preserves and re-presents the grassroots labor of families and communities searching for their loved ones. Her work insists that these individuals not be forgotten, that their absence be acknowledged publicly, and that the violence behind their disappearance be named. In doing so, [she] reminds us that artists are often the ones doing the vital archival labor that institutions overlook—protecting not just history, but memory,” commented Latzer, who is queer and bisexual.
Rainwater’s friend and fellow artist Caleb Luna, Ph.D., described her as “an incredibly important knowledge holder for her people” in an email to the B.A.R.
Luna, who identifies as queer and nonbinary trans, is currently an assistant professor of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara.
“Through Rainwater’s work, as well as her friendship, my own knowledge and understanding of issues impacting Indigenous women has been greatly expanded,” Luna commented. “Rainwater’s work shines important light on overlooked issues and pushes the boundaries of Indigenous feminism.”
Time has told, time will tell
During the height of the pandemic, Rainwater hand-painted squares of fabric and assembled them together as a sort of patchwork quilt, with “How the Fuck Are You OK.” embroidered on it (“ok.,” 2020).
In a January 30, 2025 Instagram post, she wrote that friends had recently stopped by her studio and expressed that the artwork resonated with them.
"[The piece] feels on point for this moment,” the caption reads. “It’s been hidden away but lately I’ve had it leaned against a door to give it some room to breathe, speak, and maybe inspire new works.”
It seems to have done just that, as Rainwater is currently busying herself with new projects and plans to return to the South this summer, specifically Mississippi, to take more photographs of her homelands.
One can expect for her to take the reins of the narrative in these endeavors – and unapologetically so.
“Artists have a lot of power in that way. They can broach heavy subjects and subjects that people don't want to talk about,” Rainwater said. “Continuing to do that is important.”
This story is part of the Digital Equity Local Voices Fellowship lab through News is Out. The lab initiative is made possible with support from Comcast NBCUniversal.