In her San Francisco work, the spacesuit, the city bus and the inherited cloth all become ways to make a Black future visible.
An astronaut does not have to leave Earth to show what has been pushed out of view. In Afatasi's BLACK SPACE, two figures wear suits she created while familiar San Francisco bus lines move through the work. The 38 Geary, the Third Street bus and the 22 Fillmore are not incidental municipal details. They connect Black residents to neighborhoods, gatherings and histories that a city can celebrate in theory while displacing in practice. The artwork brings the language of space travel down to the scale of a transit route. Its future begins with a question about who is allowed to remain in the city.
The 2020 presentation by Bakanal de Afrique describes conical forms in the suits inspired by rockets and illuminated helmets that speak to lives forced into shadow. It credits Afatasi with the costumes and backing track, Jean Melesaine with photography, and Ashley Williams and Latrice McNealy as models. Those names matter. The imagined travelers do not float free of human labor or of a specific place. Afatasi constructed a visual situation in which Black San Franciscans occupy the space-age image and the ordinary streets that made their lives possible.
Afatasi identifies as Afro-Polynesian. In a first-person interview with Afro Urban Society, she described a mother from Western Samoa and a Black American father from Memphis. She was born and raised in San Francisco. Her work often asks how those lineages can be carried in a city whose public stories do not always make room for them. Fabric, photos, murals and fashion performances are not separate ventures linked only by a signature. They offer different places for a historical image to appear, change scale and acquire an audience.
A suit made for a city
The spacesuits in BLACK SPACE are theatrical, but their references are carefully placed. Afatasi's conical shapes take a form associated with the NASA rocket, a machine whose silhouette is instantly recognized as a sign of the future. On the suits, that form belongs to Black bodies in San Francisco. The city bus beside them shifts the implied destination. These travelers may need no launchpad; they have routes through a metropolis whose Black neighborhoods have faced erasure. The work brings two meanings of space together: the cosmos offered by the costume and the urban ground contested by residents.
The photographic form matters as much as the suit. A model in a constructed garment can be seen as a character, yet the documented bus line anchors the character in an actual transit system. The viewer has to move between fiction and evidence. San Francisco's self-image as technologically progressive can feel expansive, but Afatasi asks what that progress means if Black communities lose the streets and institutions that connect them. A future-looking city is a poor future for people treated as temporary guests in the places they helped make.
The backing track adds another dimension that a still image cannot hold alone. Its credit places Afatasi in the sound of the slideshow as well as the fabric of the suits. The 2020 project's three-minute duration suggests a sequence rather than a single poster. A bus route passes through time; so does a sound. Both can carry an imagined traveler from one image to the next. Afatasi's authorship joins media, while the models and photographer remain visible collaborators in the finished work.
The work's title, BLACK SPACE, makes its argument without needing a longer slogan. Space is a region beyond Earth, but it is also a room, street, cultural institution or interval in a schedule. Black space can be made, taken, remembered and defended at every scale. The astronaut image expands possibility, while the city routes insist that possibility must have somewhere to land. Afatasi's future is strongest when those two scales remain joined.
Cloth that carries more than one lineage
The artist's textile work makes a similar argument through material. In her (TAPA)stry series, Afatasi combines African print fabric, Indigenous Polynesian barkcloth, Samoan cloth and patches in works whose materials do not dissolve into a single decorative surface. The named fabrics carry different histories and ways of use. A seam can join them without claiming they were always one tradition. Such decisions make a mixed inheritance visible as something constructed, chosen and remembered.
The Three Wise Women, a 2019 work in the series, uses cloth from her late mother's ia lava lava. Afatasi explains that the garment is worn by both men and women in Samoan culture and that the central figures represent herself and her sisters. The piece reworks the biblical wise-men story through women in her own family. That change is not simply a substitution of female figures for male ones. The inherited cloth has been worn, kept and remade. It gives the scene an actual family material from which a new image can be formed.
Another 2019 (TAPA)stry, Paleali'i Mo Basquiat, uses African print, Indigenous Polynesian barkcloth and patches to honor Jean-Michel Basquiat. Afatasi's account explains that encountering his work gave her an early image of Black excellence in art, and that crowns in her piece answer the crowns in his. The homage is neither an attempt to borrow his status nor a general claim about “influence.” It identifies a visual motif and gives it a new material setting. A crown that was drawn or painted can be sewn into a textile beside forms tied to Afatasi's own ancestry.
The cloth makes time uneven in a useful way. A mother's garment can enter a contemporary artwork; an art-historical reference can move into a fabric practice; a constellation may connect ancestral navigation to a future journey. In the same series, the Southern Cross appears as a reference to Polynesian seafaring. Celestial space therefore has more than one role in Afatasi's work. It can evoke a rocket in an astronaut suit, but it can also be a navigational resource remembered through Indigenous knowledge. Neither meaning has to cancel the other.
A mural that travels after installation
In 2023 Afatasi made Modalities and Motifs, a 500-foot public artwork for the fence of San Francisco's Southeast Treatment Plant in Bayview–Hunters Point. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission's account describes the installation along Evans Avenue. A construction fence is a difficult kind of canvas. It belongs to a temporary public project and can easily be treated as a blank surface for beautification while the adjacent community's own history remains unnamed. Afatasi filled the length with a symbolic language tied to lineage, freedom, medical exploitation and local migration.
Her description of the work names five motifs. The North Star recalls navigation for people escaping enslavement. A Buffalo Soldier points toward service under segregation. “HELA” remembers Henrietta Lacks and the medical systems that used her cells without informed consent. A folding chair, titled “Fade in the Water,” refers to the 2023 Montgomery Riverfront incident and a public image of resistance. The “Freedom Day Transfer” links Juneteenth to transit and to the movement of Texas-descended families westward. Each sign has a different political and temporal weight. Repetition across the fence lets them become a vocabulary rather than a set of isolated memorial stickers.
The transit motif is especially precise. At the installation, Afatasi pointed to a Muni transfer dated June 19, 1865, a constructed object that lets a historic emancipation date enter the everyday language of a bus ticket. No one could have ridden a San Francisco bus on that date with such a transfer. Its impossible date is the point. It asks a present city to carry an emancipation history through ordinary movement. A transit slip is usually disposable, yet here it becomes a marker of a migration and a claim to the city's routes.
The North Star sits in the background of the mural, and Afatasi connected that placement to the way Black Americans are often pushed to the background of public narratives. The visual arrangement is an argument about attention. A background can be necessary to finding one's way, even if a passerby notices the large figures first. Across a long fence, viewers may encounter the work from a vehicle, on foot or in fragments. The repeated motifs allow several speeds of reading. Someone who passes daily can find a different sign each time.
The commission's scale required collaboration. The SFPUC account credits Bayview–Hunters Point graphic designer Sophia Tupuola with helping develop the mural concept and translate Afatasi's woodblock prints into the installation. That contribution complicates any story of a solitary artist covering a giant fence by force of personality alone. The artwork's public life required technical translation and local relationships. Those conditions fit its subject: a neighborhood is made by people working alongside one another, not by an image of community pasted over an empty map.
The banner cut into another life
Temporary public art often disappears when a project ends. Afatasi planned a different route for the material. Her 2024 exhibition Decipher at Sunbelt Gallery cut selected sections directly from the Modalities and Motifs banner and placed them inside enlarged ornamental frames. The continuous work became discrete objects. A figure formerly seen during a walk along Evans Avenue could be studied at close range; a motif once caught in a peripheral glance could become the center of a gallery encounter.
That change does not make the gallery an automatic promotion over the street. The two settings ask for different kinds of looking. On the fence, the work was accessible along an everyday route, exposed to weather, speed and public life. In the gallery, the cut sections were slowed down and given a new context. Decipher treats those differences as part of the artwork's history. The title asks viewers to read references they may previously have met only in passing.
The shift also changes what a mural can be. Rather than treating the banner as waste after removal, Afatasi let it become the material of another exhibition. Its temporary installation had a planned future. The San Francisco Public Utilities Commission reported during installation that parts of the art would later be sewn into clothes. Afatasi's own account of Decipher documents the gallery reuse of selected sections. These are distinct documented routes, and both reveal the same design instinct: a public image can continue in another form when its first site closes.
The idea of return matters in a neighborhood where change is often described as improvement without enough attention to who has had to move. Reusing a mural is not a solution to displacement, but it refuses the assumption that a community artwork is a disposable wrapper around construction. Afatasi keeps the symbols available for another encounter. The material moves, while its Bayview history remains attached to it.
Fashion as a gathering
Afatasi also presents wearable work through the Futurism Fashion Experience. Southern Exposure's record notes that her immersive Blending Worlds event in February 2022 drew more than 200 participants and grew into an annual program. This is a different format from a museum case containing one garment. It joins fashion, visual art and installation with people who can gather around them. The future is not only pictured on a body; it is staged as an encounter among bodies.
The SFO Museum press-image index identifies her America's Outta Pocket ensemble with a space helmet from 2023 and a Planetary ensemble from 2024. The museum describes her work as wearable art that fits varied bodies and often crosses gender categories. The space helmet connects directly to her astronaut imagery, but the garments' practical question is different from a photograph: how does a person move inside an imagined future, and who has been given access to wear it?
Afatasi's own account of her practice includes genealogy workshops and the Sunbelt Gallery in Bayview. The workshops address histories that slavery interrupted; the gallery gives local artists and neighbors a place to meet. These are not side activities to be detached from the clothing and mural. A future imagined for Black residents of San Francisco needs the ability to trace a past and the present space to gather. The artist makes both questions physical, whether through a garment's fit or a gallery's door.
Her public comments also keep the work from becoming a frictionless celebration of city culture. In an interview about an earlier Bayview mural project, she welcomed safety improvements while questioning why investment can arrive alongside gentrification and without enough community explanation. That skepticism strengthens BLACK SPACE. The astronaut is no decorative proof that a progressive metropolis includes everyone. The suit asks what inclusion requires on the ground.
Krull's report from Southnord Artfest follows another set of Black artists negotiating how their work is seen within an art institution. Afatasi's context is San Francisco rather than Stockholm. Her fence, gallery and wearable works still make the institutional question concrete: where can an artist from a community place an image, and how does that site change who can encounter it? A bus route, an airport gallery and a neighborhood fence give different answers.
The work's Afrofuturism is anchored in named materials and named places. A helmet points outward, a Samoan family cloth looks backward, and a Juneteenth transfer puts an impossible historical date into the present tense of a commute. Those directions meet in the city Afatasi knows. She can imagine a traveler beyond Earth while insisting that the traveler has a home address, a lineage and a route through San Francisco. The future becomes credible because it must answer to all three.