The sentence is short enough to read from a moving car: “There Are Black People in the Future.” It appeared on a billboard in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, a neighborhood under pressure from redevelopment. Alisha B. Wormsley had been writing those words in sketchbooks and on objects for years. On a large public sign, they became impossible to keep within the private space of an artist's notebook. The statement names an obvious possibility that many images of the future still fail to grant: Black people remain, shape places and have time ahead of them.
The billboard was removed, and the removal became part of the work's public history. Wormsley's account of the project describes a response from community members and the subsequent creation of grants for artists, organizers and residents in Pittsburgh. The sentence traveled to other cities and countries. Its repetitions were not merely copies of an image. Each location asked what it would take for Black futures to be supported there, in the material conditions of a neighborhood rather than only in the rhetoric of a campaign.
Wormsley is a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist whose work moves through video, installation, public text, speculative film and social practice. The SFO Museum's Women of Afrofuturism exhibition traces the phrase back to 2012 and places it beside her Homewood objects, preserved in resin, and the East Liberty billboard. The work's future tense becomes more complex as the forms accumulate. It is a promise, an argument, an archive and a demand that the city make room for the people it claims to celebrate.
A sentence in a changing neighborhood
The East Liberty billboard had a striking economy. It did not show a face, a spacecraft or a utopian city. It placed a claim about existence on a commercial structure built to attract public attention. This choice matters. A billboard usually asks a passerby to buy something or remember a brand. Wormsley used the format to name a future that urban development often treats as negotiable. The absence of a product leaves the viewer with a question about the neighborhood around the sign.
The words can sound reassuring, yet they also expose a threat. If the statement were universally assumed, it would not need to be said. In a district where property values, storefronts and residents are changing, “future” is not an abstract date on a calendar. It concerns who will be able to remain, who will own, who will work and whose children will recognize the streets. The sign gave that question a visible form without pretending to answer it on behalf of every resident.
According to Wormsley's project page, the phrase has appeared in Detroit, Charlotte, New York, Kansas City, Houston, London, Accra and Doha, among other sites. Repetition could have made the work into a recognizable slogan detached from local stakes. Her model invites sites to draw on the precedent of support through commissions, grants and programming. The words are permitted to travel, but their force depends on the relationships built around them.
Wormsley explicitly encourages others to use the text freely. That permission changes the status of the phrase. An artist can retain authorship while allowing a sentence to become a public tool. The project has moved through protest, testimony, essays and song. Its future is not controlled by a single edition or object. The work can be remade as people find situations in which they need to say it.
The SFO Museum describes Wormsley's earlier practice of stamping the words onto artifacts gathered from Homewood, a Black Pittsburgh community, then preserving those objects in resin. This sequence is a different kind of public address from the billboard. A small object carries a trace of a resident's life. Encasing it gives the ordinary thing a speculative afterlife, as if it might need to be recovered by a later generation. The future is thus imagined through what the present risks losing.
The resin does not make a neighborhood static. A preserved artifact can tell us that someone used, held or valued it, but it cannot substitute for that person's continuing life. Wormsley's larger project keeps moving between preservation and action. The billboard declares presence; the grants and local programming ask how presence can be sustained. Neither form is enough by itself. Together they make the future tense less comfortable and more useful.
The archive called Children of NAN
Wormsley's speculative world Children of NAN: Mothership approaches Black survival through an episodic experimental film. On her site she describes a distant post-apocalyptic setting in which a group of Black women called the Abassi, or sibyls, live in tension with a group of white men led by a scientist. The protagonist Aditi 34 has known only an underground laboratory where she and her sisters were created. Their maker claims confinement is for their safety. An archive offers Aditi fragments of the world beyond the lab, and visions of their mother, NAN, lead her toward escape and a search for her sisters.
The premise places control over information at the center of the drama. Aditi's keeper can define the lab as protection because he also controls what she has been allowed to know. The archive interrupts his account. It does not simply deliver an answer in one scene; it gives the protagonist material from which to imagine a world beyond the one designed for her. The search for a mother becomes a search for another history and another set of possible relations.
Wormsley calls the project a survival guide built from storytelling, myth and histories of Black women that have been missing, distorted or used to disempower them. This is a precise reason for its science-fiction form. The invented laboratory makes a real mechanism of power visible: people can be confined through a story about their own safety. The speculative future can stage an escape from that story and ask what an archive must contain to help someone make it.
The film's episodic structure also refuses a single rescue narrative. Wormsley's site describes chapters in which Aditi encounters different dimensions and times while looking for a sister. A future is not reached once and settled. It is searched for through fragments, memories and repeated efforts to recognize kin. That rhythm resembles the billboard project's movement between places, though the forms are very different. One sends a sentence through public space; the other sends a character through imagined time.
Another Wormsley work, Remnants of An Advanced Technology, gives the archive physical access points: quilts, tapestries and glass vessels. She describes Black women as maps, circuits and wombs within the project's language. These are metaphors with material bodies. A quilt can cover, carry and display; a vessel can contain; a tapestry holds threads in relation. The work asks the viewer to think of knowledge as something embedded in making and care, not only in a database.
Wormsley's description of Black women as maps gives the quilts a second orientation. Threads organize a surface one can touch and read; the map metaphor asks where a remembered life belongs within a larger territory. It does not require a literal chart sewn into every textile. A quilt may hold relationships and memories whose boundaries are less exact than those of a surveyed place. In the installation, cloth becomes one way to approach an archive through the body, while the vessels and tapestries offer other ways to imagine what such an archive can contain.
A mobile temple for survival
In 2024 Wormsley described Children of NAN: A Survival Guide as a film for future Black femmes made through performed philosophies, rituals and survival strategies. Its mobile set, the Temple of Our Survival, was a tent quilted on the outside and filled inside with printed textiles, rugs, plants, herbs, ancestral images, a library, a loom, a typewriter and places to rest. The inventory is specific because survival is specific. People need practices, tools, stories and space in which to use them.
A mobile set can go to people whose knowledge the artist wants to record. Wormsley planned to travel with the structure and invite healers, activists and makers to offer lessons and stories. The temple is not a neutral backdrop for interviews. Its textures and objects establish a setting in which the contributors' expertise can be approached as part of a larger Black femme archive. A footbath and a table for cards may seem far from a futuristic machine. In this work they matter because rest, conversation and bodily care are technologies of continuation.
The set's mobility also changes the direction of an institution's usual invitation. Rather than asking every participant to come to a gallery, the structure can arrive in places tied to their work and memory. A future-oriented archive grows through encounter. The filmic apparatus and the gathering space become parts of the same project, each shaping what can be said and remembered.
Wormsley's account of the project names people and places she hoped the mobile structure would reach. The itinerary gives a sense of the communities she wanted to connect. Even at its first presentation, the structure suggested a different relationship between artists and participants: knowledge could be gathered where people were already sustaining one another. The future emerged through conversation, not as a finished design delivered from outside.
Dreaming with Kite
In Cosmologyscape, Wormsley worked with Oglála Lakȟóta artist Kite on a public project presented in Brooklyn in 2024. Creative Time describes an invitation to dream across a website, workshops, public programming and sculptural seating. The collaboration joined Black and Indigenous approaches to imagining the future while retaining each artist's distinct practice. It did not place two traditions side by side as decorative motifs. It asked people to contribute dreams and made the conditions for dreaming part of the public conversation.
The project began from a practical inequity. Rest is unevenly distributed. Creative Time points to hostile architecture and laws that deter racialized people from sleeping or staying in public space. A dreamy future cannot ignore who has a safe place to close their eyes in the present. The work moves from a widely shared human capacity to the social arrangements that make its exercise unequal.
Contributed dreams became algorithmically generated quilt squares in a digital tapestry, drawing on Lakota visual language and Black quilting traditions as described by Creative Time. A further process translated that collected material into patterns for public sculptures: benches wrapped in mosaics and plant life. The sequence is important. A participant's dream was not displayed as an isolated confession. It entered a collective visual system and then an object that other people could use in public space.
Kite and Wormsley share authorship of Cosmologyscape. Creative Time also credits website designers, fabricators, graphic designers and musicians who helped bring it into physical and digital form. Their labor matters to an artwork that argues for collective future-making. The artists' concept had to become a website people could navigate, a bench strong enough to sit on and a place that could hold a public gathering.
The technical process is not presented as an automatic source of justice. Algorithms can easily reproduce exclusions already in the data or design choices that govern them. Here the process is framed by artists, invited contributions and specific cultural vocabularies. The project makes machine learning one part of an encounter among participants, traditions and a public site. Its question is who directs the tool and what kind of rest the resulting space supports.
The future as a place to remain
Wormsley's projects differ in scale and medium, but each tests the relation between a future image and material support. The East Liberty billboard put a claim into city space. The Homewood objects asked what histories might need to survive redevelopment. Children of NAN made an archive a route out of confinement. The mobile temple gathered practical knowledge for people who will come after. Cosmologyscape connected dreaming to a bench, a website and the unequal politics of rest.
Her own biography describes a Black matriarchal lens as central to her art, science and technology work. That lens is visible in the choice to treat care, mothering and collective memory as forces that shape a future. It also appears in Sibyls Shrine, the residency and collective she founded for Black artists who mother. These commitments keep the work from being understood only as a visual style. They concern resources and time: who has enough of either to make art and continue living.
The sentence on the billboard is often read as an affirmation. It is one, but its directness can conceal how much work it asks of a city. A future in which Black residents appear in an advertisement yet cannot afford to remain is not the future the words demand. A future in which an archive preserves the artifacts of a displaced neighborhood while that displacement continues is not enough either. Wormsley's practice holds the statement open to those material tests.
Krull's Southnord Artfest report follows Black artists making work within and around European institutions. The geography is different, but the question of who can determine a public cultural future travels. Wormsley's billboards and grants show one way an artist can let a phrase leave the institution and become a resource for local groups. The work is shaped by the people who take it up.
One could imagine the billboard as a monument because its words are so declarative. Yet the project's strongest form may be less fixed than a monument. It can be moved, copied, argued with and joined to grants or new commissions. The sentence does not tell the viewer what the future will look like. It names people whose presence must not be designed away and leaves the building of that future as shared work.