The Memory Portal Project

2026

Everything I have been building leads to this.

The Memory Portal Project is a nationwide monument initiative addressing the absence of public memorials for communities whose histories have been excluded from America’s commemorative landscape. Its inaugural installation is Memory Portal: 1945 in Bayview, San Francisco. But this is not the end. It is the beginning of a system — a network of sites across this country where memory is no longer passive, where you do not walk past something and wonder what happened here, where you stand in front of something and know.

Oral histories. Genealogical connections. Cultural context. Policy frameworks tied to that specific land and those specific people.

This is preservation moving at the speed of reality.

I started with a fan.

I am building monuments that speak.

And I am not stopping until the landscape reflects the people who actually made it.

Afatasi the Artist is a fine artist, master welder, and archivist based in San Francisco. She is a 2026 selected artist for the SF Arts Commission Shaping Legacy Project and an exhibiting artist in Women of Afrofuturism at SFO Museum through September 2026.