Biography
Afatasi is a fine artist and cultural archivist born, raised, and based in San Francisco. Her practice spans sculpture, metalwork, textiles, genealogy research, and social practice — operating as an integrated system rooted in a governing conviction she calls Fine Arts for Reparations. It is work born of urgency: the Great Migration community of San Francisco is the city’s only consistently shrinking demographic, and Afatasi’s practice is a direct, intergenerational response to that crisis.
The granddaughter of an American steelworker and a daughter of the Great Migration, she works with scrap steel as both material and inheritance — transforming industrial remnants into monuments and relics of cultural memory. Her work is also informed by her Sāmoan heritage and grounded in fa’a Sāmoa — a cultural framework of respect, service, and relational responsibility — which guides her approach to monument-making as an act of reverence.
Her research practice, Where’re Yo’ People’s From?!? — Genealogy as Resistance, now in its fourth year, has brought ancestral research to over 350 households in Bayview-Hunters Point through an original Ancestral Reunification Methodology, returning documented lineage through handcrafted genealogy books and situating family histories within the broader structure of United States policy and power. This research directly informs her monument practice, including Memory Portal: 1945, the inaugural installation of The Memory Portal Project — a nationwide initiative addressing the absence of public memorials honoring communities whose histories have been excluded from America’s commemorative landscape.
Her social practice extends across a constellation of recurring community rituals she designs, curates, and leads on what she calls a celestial calendar — including the Futurism Fashion Experience, Mardi Gras on Third, the Sucka Free Derby, and the San Francisco Belles, the intergenerational parade group she founded in 2024. Her visual art campaigns include The Afro Block Party, a pop art series executed at monumental public scale including a 500-foot mural commissioned by the SFPUC and SFAC, and Harlem of the West, her MUNI-inspired collectible art line. The Afatasi Universe is the framework that holds all of it — a living system of cultural repair designed to sustain the living culture of her critically endangered community through art, research, ritual, and self-determination.
Her work is currently on view in Women of Afrofuturism at the SFO Museum, Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport, through September 2026. She is a 2025 recipient of the San Francisco Arts Commission Shaping Legacy grant.
Artist Statement
I am a member of a community facing an existential crisis in real time. The Great Migration families who built San Francisco's Harlem of the West have been in continuous, uninterrupted decline since 1960 — the only demographic in this city for which that is true. Our culture is disappearing. There is no cultural response equal to that loss. No political response. No economic response. This practice is my response.
My practice is The Afatasi Universe — a framework for cultural repair that holds together the monuments I weld, the genealogies I research, the wearable art I sew, and the rituals I design and lead every year on a celestial calendar. Underneath all of it is a governing conviction I call Fine Arts for Reparations — the belief that the arts must lead the way toward cultural and economic renaissance. Through Where're Yo' People's From?!? — Genealogy as Resistance — I surface the documented proof of what this community built and what was taken from it. When families discover the occupations their grandparents held, the businesses their elders owned, the contributions their lineage made to this city, something shifts. The history stops being abstract. It becomes personal. And what is personal becomes political. Genealogy is the entry point. The monuments, the wearable art, the parades, the rituals — these are what keep that consciousness alive between the discoveries, and give a community something to fold into, something to pass down, something worth fighting for.
Reparations is not an abstraction to me. It is a debt owed — for the Fillmore businesses deliberately destroyed, for the families displaced and never returned, for the population that has been declining for sixty-five years without a single institution responding with the urgency the crisis demands. I believe in the rebuild of the Harlem of the West. I believe that a robust arts and cultural scene is what makes an economic renaissance possible — that the two have always been inseparable for this community and always will be. Intergenerational harm requires an intergenerational response. The Afatasi Universe is the catalyst to a renaissance that is not only possible — it is owed.