2021 | Public Art / Mural Installation
SFMTA Bayview Vision Zero Quick-Build Project
Hunters Point Boulevard, Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco
Afro Party in the Bayview is a public artwork by Afatasi installed along the protected pedestrian and bicycle walkway of Hunters Point Boulevard in San Francisco’s Bayview–Hunters Point.
Created in 2021 as part of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency’s Bayview Vision Zero Quick-Build Project, the work transforms concrete traffic-safety barriers into a continuous celebration of Bayview–Hunters Point, its people, lineage, visual culture, and sense of place.
The Quick-Build emerged from the Bayview Community-Based Transportation Plan, a community-driven effort to address transportation safety and mobility in the neighborhood. The Evans Avenue, Hunters Point Boulevard, and Innes Avenue corridor had been identified as part of San Francisco’s High-Injury Network. At the curve where Innes becomes Hunters Point Boulevard—known locally as “Dead Man’s Curve”—SFMTA documented 20 collisions resulting in 32 injuries and one fatality during the preceding five years. The project reduced vehicle lanes, introduced crosswalk and transit improvements, and created a protected pedestrian and bicycle path using concrete K-rail barriers.
Rather than treating those barriers solely as transportation infrastructure, the project created an opportunity for artists rooted in Bayview–Hunters Point to transform them into public artworks. Afatasi was among six artists who lived or worked in the Bayview selected through a community-supported process involving SFMTA and neighborhood organizations. The San Francisco Arts Commission formally approved Afatasi’s mural under the title Afro Party in the Bayview. The larger Quick-Build mural initiative was supported by community partners including BMAGIC, Hunters Point Shipyard Citizens Advisory Committee, Shipyard Trust for the Arts, the San Francisco African American Arts & Cultural District, and the India Basin Neighborhood Association.
Bayview Quick Builds- Uplifting Voices and Fostering Community
For her installation, Afatasi brought the emerging visual language of The Afro Block Party directly into the landscape of her neighborhood. Across the barriers, Afro Block Party characters appear alongside textile-derived patterns, symbols, humor, language, and repeated figures. Gold faces and Afros move across fields of green, red, black, and yellow; patterns evoke textile and ancestral design systems; and phrases including “Welcome to… Bayview Hunters Point!,” “WE’RE Golden,” and “Bayview Hunters Point is… a vital cultural fabric of… San Francisco!” turn the walkway into an affirmation of place.
One section connects generations through the repeated word AXÉ, moving through ancestors, elders, parents, and children. Elsewhere, Afatasi’s playful Afro Block Party universe introduces characters and wordplay including the Yee ’Fro Bees, D’Afro-Dils, Baby Hurrr, and other figures that bring joy and accessibility into a work concerned with inheritance, belonging, and community visibility.
The textile language running throughout the installation is significant to Afatasi’s broader multidisciplinary practice. Pattern is not simply decorative; it becomes a means of connecting people, generations, and histories. The declaration that Bayview–Hunters Point is a “vital cultural fabric of San Francisco” therefore operates both literally and metaphorically: the neighborhood and the people who built it are part of the fabric of the city.
The work also marks an early public expression of ideas that would continue developing throughout Afatasi’s practice: lineage, intergenerational continuity, neighborhood memory, public space, and the insistence that communities should be able to recognize themselves within the environments they inhabit.
As Afatasi told SFMTA at the project’s unveiling:
“I love making art for my community; I want local residents to see themselves in everything I create.”
The Bayview Quick-Build was unveiled in April 2021. The San Francisco County Transportation Authority subsequently described the project as combining protected bikeways and pedestrian-safety improvements with murals by local artists, making the artwork part of a larger community-driven transformation of the corridor.
Project Details:
Artist: Afatasi
Title: Afro Party in the Bayview
Year: 2021
Medium: Public mural / painted concrete K-rail barriers
Location: Hunters Point Boulevard pedestrian and bicycle walkway, Bayview–Hunters Point, San Francisco
Commission: SFMTA Bayview Vision Zero Quick-Build Project
Funding / Art Partner: Shipyard Trust for the Arts
Series: The Afro Block Party