The Afro Block Party: The Classics
2020
Mural
African American Art & Culture Complex, San Francisco
The Afro Block Party: The Classics is Afatasi’s first mural, created in 2020 for the African American Art & Culture Complex in San Francisco. The work features four foundational characters of The Afro Block Party—The Afro, Afro Puffs, Thee Fine-Apple, and the ’Fro Hawk—presented as a repeating field of hand-painted character panels.
The mural celebrates natural hair, individuality and self-expression through the graphic visual language of The Afro Block Party. Hearts, diamonds, Afros, puffs and illustrated portraits repeat across the wall, transforming the individual characters into a large-scale pattern and establishing an early vocabulary that would continue throughout the project.
The four characters represented in the mural now comprise The Classics Series, the foundational character works of The Afro Block Party. The mural marks an early expansion of the project from illustration into architectural space and the beginning of a larger body of works through which its characters would continue to inhabit fine art, public art, exhibitions, objects and the imagined world of San ’Fro-Cisco.