Biography
Afatasi is a lineage-based fine artist and welder born, raised, and based in San Francisco. An ascendant of San Francisco’s Great Migration community, she creates contemporary works in response to the ongoing cultural loss and displacement of her community, developing enduring systems through which lineage can be preserved, practiced, and carried forward.
Her practice is guided by Fine Arts for Reparations, an artistic philosophy asserting that fine art can contribute to the broader work of reparations through cultural continuity, public memory, education, and advocacy. She is the creator of The Afatasi Universe, an evolving artistic framework that transforms lineage into living culture through a Celestial Calendar of recurring cultural observances and a constellation of self-sustaining artistic houses.
Her work is currently featured in Women of Afrofuturism at SFO Museum through October 2026. In 2025, she received the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Shaping Legacy Grant to create Memory Portal: 1945, the inaugural installation of The Memory Portal Project, a monument methodology that preserves lineage through public art.
Artist Statement
I am a lineage-based fine artist born, raised, and based in San Francisco.
As an ascendant of San Francisco’s Great Migration community, I come from a culture experiencing ongoing cultural loss and displacement in real time. Within my lifetime, I have watched neighborhoods transform, traditions fade, institutions disappear, and irreplaceable cultural knowledge become increasingly vulnerable. These experiences have shaped not only what I make, but why I make it.
The circumstances of my community demand something different from me as an artist.
My practice is guided by an artistic philosophy I call Fine Arts for Reparations.
I believe that when a community faces cultural loss, the role of the fine artist extends beyond the creation of beautiful objects. It becomes the work of creating enduring systems through which culture can be practiced, inherited, and carried forward. I also believe the arts have an essential role to play in the broader work of reparations by cultivating historical understanding, strengthening cultural identity, supporting public education, and creating the conditions through which communities can organize, advocate, and imagine more just futures.
My response is The Afatasi Universe.
The Afatasi Universe is the artistic framework through which I practice this philosophy. It exists to transform lineage into living culture through two interconnected systems: a Celestial Calendar of recurring cultural observances and a constellation of Artistic Houses. Together, they create enduring structures through which culture is actively practiced, sustained, and inherited across generations.
Working across monuments, hand-welded sculpture, public art, genealogy, regalia, archival practice, and original intellectual property, I create artworks that function not only as objects of beauty, but as instruments of cultural continuity. Every body of work within my practice serves a distinct purpose while contributing to a larger vision of cultural stewardship.
Whether I am creating a monument, establishing a cultural observance, leading a genealogy research initiative, developing ceremonial regalia, or building an original intellectual property, I am asking the same question:
How can fine art help a culture continue?
That question continues to guide my practice.