Modalities and Motifs — SEP Fence Project, 2023
Modalities and Motifs is a 500-foot public artwork created for the Southeast Treatment Plant construction fence along Evans Avenue in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Point. The installation brings together original symbols, repeating patterns, and works from The Afro Block Party to create an expansive visual narrative of lineage, cultural memory, resistance, and San Francisco’s Great Migration community.
Five original motifs form the symbolic language of the installation. The Buffalo Soldier honors a legacy of military service and the generations who served despite segregation; the North Star recalls the celestial guide used by freedom seekers and the architects of freedom who came before us; HELA memorializes Henrietta Lacks and those subjected to medical exploitation and neglect; Fade in the Water, represented through the folding chair, marks resistance and collective defense in the wake of the 2023 Montgomery Riverfront Brawl; and the Freedom Day Transfer connects Juneteenth, San Francisco’s Texas-descended Great Migration families, and the trains and public transportation systems that carried generations westward.
Across the 500-foot installation, these motifs repeat alongside works from The Afro Block Party, including E.T. ’Fro Home, The Golden Afro-Noon, Fog City–San ’Fro-Cisco, and other reinterpretations of art history, popular culture, and San Francisco life. Rather than functioning as decoration, the patterns operate as a system of visual storytelling—placing individual artworks within a larger continuum of ancestry, place, migration, memory, and cultural inheritance. The press release for the project specifically describes the five motifs and Afro Block Party excerpts as the two visual systems carried across the mural.
Modalities and Motifs marked an important expansion of The Afro Block Party from individual illustrated works into large-scale public art. It also established a symbolic vocabulary that continues to evolve within Afatasi’s practice, with motifs first developed for this installation later informing her monument studies and monumental works.
From its conception, Modalities and Motifs was designed to continue beyond the SEP Fence installation; selected sections were later cut from the banner and transformed into Decipher, Afatasi’s 2024 exhibition at Sunbelt Gallery.
Temporary Public Art Installation
500 ft. in length
Evans Avenue, Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco
2023
Commissioned through the SFPUC + San Francisco Arts Commission Temporary Public Art Program