The San Francisco Arts Commission, or SFAC, welcomed its most recent exhibit, Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura, Oct. 8, 2026. Compiled by Ashara Ekundayo, the gallery features multimedia works by multidisciplinary artists Sydney Cain, Ayana V. Jackson, Courtney Desiree Morris and Bryant Terry.
The exhibition takes on the name of a Star Trek Character from the 1960s, Lieutenant Nyota Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols. Unraveling in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, Nichols’ portrayal became a catalyst for the image of the African woman existing in power, the conversations she started feeding into the exhibition’s central theme: “Afrofuturism,” exploring the preservation of Black identity and memory across African temporal dimensions.
In the gallery, time is a complex, cyclical and an inherently spiritual concept, where past feeds into present.
Spaced evenly at the entrance, four works by Sydney Cain lay in wait.
Across their work, Cain employs darkness as a reminder of presence. In “a rising ride lifts all boats,” unmistakable silhouettes, all facing different directions, spring from masses of dusty brown on the ocean floor, portraying a jumble of people who shoulder a sea of their own. Through minute details and massive shades, the artist illustrates the regard of the Black community as a tenured and complex force, carrying the weight of a cumulative memory.
Upon venturing into the gallery’s side room, the viewer is met with the multimedia work of Ayana V. Jackson — featuring a garment set made in collaboration with Robert Young and Rama Diaw, and videos with music by composer Nosisi Ngakane. The work draws inspiration from Afrofuturist mythos penned by Detroit duo Drexciya, wherein “The Drexciyans” are the surviving children of pregnant, enslaved African mothers who were drowned due to their perceived inutility.
The 2023 video, “Take Me to the Water: Baptism by Waters both Salty and Sweet” is an ode to the story spun by Drexciya, containing two videos played in parallel: one containing a woman descending into the ocean, a boat settled on her head, the other with a woman clad in white staggering into the waves, face unseen. Side by side, their convictions are almost the same: both seeking, both guiding, both escaping.
The 2020-26 garment, named “Harness the Storm: Drift into a Time of No Future,” is composed of scraps of carefully shaped fabric, laid in layers on the torso and tapering into a mullet skirt at the rear of a sculpture. Resplendent with earthly colors, the piece incorporates traditional water symbolism from Afrocultural groups in Trinidad and Tobago.
The work of Courtney Desiree Morris, a visual performance artist, occupies the next wall. Morris associates her artistic purpose with “the interplay between the landscape and human subjectivity,” place and time bleeding into the clothing she inhabits. Her 2023 garment “Bendición” is embroidered with beads and shells, and sewn with fabric patches containing pictures of women enshrined in galactical imagery.
In her accompanying performance video, paired with headphones for viewer observation, Morris leads a Spanish procession forward, her body uninhibited as she sways, spasms and screams. Her insistent words claw through the screen: “Soy el agua antigua, La madre eterna … Yo estuve aqui,” meaning “I am the ancient water, the eternal mother. I was here.” The film brims with generational resolve, unweathered by time and unwilling to dissipate.
The final section of the exhibition, containing works by Bryant Terry, takes on a novel approach. Canvas shifts to shelves of preserved food, mannequins to an installation of speakers and cooktops. Artwork “cut/taste” honors American visual artist Romare Bearden, known for representing Black history through exacting geometric collages.
The installation is composed of a table, with an archival image of Bearden framed above it and an assortment of objects aligned neatly below it. Namely, a turntable with side one of MF Doom’s Mm..Food record, a music mixer, a speaker, an induction cooktop and a food dehydrator. Inspecting food as inextricably linked to social structures in America, Terry’s work intertwines different aspects of the Black household to highlight cultural resilience and persistence through the modern age.
In the SFAC gallery, projections of stars onto walls and inquisitive, looping music invite reflection on the sonorous history of an American people. Thickly laden with the artistic purpose of each contributor, Excavating Uranus presents a multidimensional representation of Black memory, carefully examining the past and the present to paint a galaxy of possibilities for the future.