Biography
Afatasi is a lineage-based fine artist born, raised, and based in San Francisco. Her practice is a response to the cultural loss and displacement of Black San Francisco. Through her work, she keeps the Southern-rooted culture of the city’s Great Migration lineage visible, practiced and self-defined while advancing an arts and cultural renaissance centered on that lineage.
Her work is guided by Fine Arts for Reparations, Afatasi’s philosophy of committing her fine-arts practice to the repair and cultural self-determination of her lineage in San Francisco. Her understanding of that responsibility is also shaped by fa’a Sāmoa, through which she was raised to understand relationship, service, reciprocity and accountability as active obligations. For Afatasi, witnessing the diminishment of the San Francisco community that raised her makes artistic response a matter of responsibility.
Her practice includes both collectible works and larger cultural forms. Genealogy is foundational to the work: a spiritual discipline and community offering that returns ancestral knowledge to families while continually informing the symbols, stories and forms she creates.
Afatasi is the creator of The Afatasi Universe, the larger artistic world through which her distinct bodies of work, cultural rituals and recurring traditions exist in relationship to one another.
In 2025, Afatasi received the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy Grant to create Memory Portal: 1945, the inaugural monument of The Memory Portal Project. Her work has also been featured in Women of Afrofuturism at SFO Museum.
Artist Statement
I am a lineage-based fine artist born and raised in San Francisco. My practice is a response to the cultural loss and displacement of Black San Francisco and to the diminishing presence of the Great Migration community that raised me.
I create from the belief that culture must remain visible, practiced and self-defined by the people who inherit it. My work is rooted in the Southern traditions carried west by our families and in the responsibility I feel to help advance an arts and cultural renaissance centered on that lineage.
I call the guiding philosophy of my practice Fine Arts for Reparations. For me, fine art can participate directly in repair. I understand my practice as a responsibility to create, preserve, restore and build in ways that strengthen the cultural life of my lineage in San Francisco. Monument making is one expression of that responsibility. So are the objects, symbols, regalia, stories, rituals and cultural forms I create.
My understanding of responsibility is also shaped by fa’a Sāmoa. I was raised to understand relationship, service, reciprocity and accountability as active obligations. That ethic is not always visually apparent in my work, yet it is foundational to the way I understand my role as an artist. Witnessing the diminishment of the community that raised me and remaining passive would conflict with everything I was taught about responsibility to people and place.
Genealogy is the spiritual foundation of my practice. I research lineage to understand who our people were, where they came from, what they endured and what they built. I consider this work part of my tithes and offerings to the culture that raised me. What I learn through genealogy continually returns to the art—in symbols, materials, stories, monuments and new cultural forms.
My practice includes collectible works as well as larger cultural structures. Some ideas become sculpture. Some become regalia, illustration or public art. Others require procession, ceremony, recurring traditions or entire systems through which culture can be practiced collectively. I do not separate these forms from one another. They are different expressions of the same commitment.
Through The Afatasi Universe, I bring these bodies of work into relationship with one another while allowing each to retain its own identity. The Universe is where art object, ritual, lineage, memory and cultural practice meet.
I am interested in what can be built when a lineage refuses disappearance. My work is an act of remembrance, self-determination and creation—rooted in the people who came before me and made for those who will come after.