Black women have long shaped, defined and defied time and space through labor, travel, translation and the quiet stewardship of knowledge; hear from artists in the forthcoming SFAC gallery show, Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura, whose works function as archaeological scriptures, poetic, mystical and instructive, informing how the exhibition engages ritual knowledge, cosmology and the technologies needed to navigate multiple temporal and spatial realities.
About the exhibition at the SFAC Galleries:
Curated by Ashara S. Ekundayo, Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura aims to transport the cosmonaut into a nonlinear temporal field shaped by Black temporalities. Through installation, experimental video, photography, sound and sculptural fashion, the artists surface interdimensional relics, artifacts and incantations lifted from parallel realities where memory and possibility meet. Participating artists in the exhibition and panel include Sydney Cain, Ayana V. Jackson and Courtney Desiree Morris.
This program is part of the Power & Public Memory: Shaping Legacy Program Series, which uplifts community stories and artists’ proposals for reimagined commemorative landscapes and inclusive spaces of public memory. The series runs through November, with programs on the first Wednesday of each month.
BIOS
Ashara Ekundayo is a queer, Black feminist interdisciplinary independent curator of contemporary art, visual maker, cultural theologian, arts organizer and consultant whose creative practice is rooted in joy-informed pedagogies and the study, creation and maintenance of Black archives. In the tradition of critical artistic action and dynamic imagination she also conjures collaborative site-responsive ceremony, and utilizes artist-based strategies such as photography, screenprinting, zine-making, installation and altar-making to illuminate the specific expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Her work explores healing, memory, space and place and she has worked with Black and Brown communities across borders in support of issues of land, access and self-determination. She is the Founder, Curator/Executive Creative Director at Artist As First Responder and Principal at AECreative Consulting Partners, LLC.
Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. As a scholar, her work examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; authoritarianism and Latin American statecraft; race, energy and environmental politics in the African Diaspora; and Black feminist/queer aesthetics and visual culture. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023).
Sydney Cain received their MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT (2024), and their BA from San Francisco State University, CA (2021). Exhibitions include Flesh of the Forest, OxyArts, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2023); Figure Telling: Contemporary Bay Area Figuration, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA (2023); In Frequencies, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2022); Collective Arising: The Insistence of Black Bay Area Artists, Museum of Sonoma County, Sonoma, CA (2022); Sydney Cain: Refutations, The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2021) (solo); Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism, Oakland Museum of California, CA (2021); and The Black Woman Is God: Reprogramming That God Code, SOMArts, San Francisco, CA (2016). Cain’s work is included in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the Crocker Museum, San Jose, CA.
Shaping Legacy is a multi-year commitment to critically examine the monuments and memorials in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection. The project will engage communities that have historically been excluded from discussions, produce an Audit report, create opportunities for artist-led activations in public space and support temporary installations that reimagine future monuments and memorials in our city.
The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) is the City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy. SFAC programs include: Civic Art Collection, Civic Design Review, Community Investments, Public Art, SFAC Galleries and Art Vendor Licensing.
Banner image: Artists Ashara Ekundayo, Courtney Desiree Morris, Sydney Cain
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