Psalm & Stardust: An Artist Talk & Listening Session @ SFAC

Art Bae Event Link Join SFAC Galleries and the Shaping Legacy project for a hybrid artist talk/listening session guided by musical and sonic inspirations selected by the artists of "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura” , and the ways in which sound, memory, and poetics have and will forever travel across space and time. Moderated by exhibition curator Ashara Ekundayo. "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura," is a group exhibition that utilizes African cosmologies to translate our inhabiting the past, present, and future simultaneously and the tools and songs needed for time travel. Curated by Ashara Ekundayo, the exhibition brings together the work of Sydney Cain, Ayana V. Jackson, Courtney Desiree Morris, and bryant terry. About the panelists Ashara Ekundayo (moderator) is a Black feminist, independent curator, public researcher, archivist, and social practice artist whose work uses art and creative labor as a catalyst for social transformation and collective imagination. Rooted in the Black Radical Tradition her practice considers the power of artists to shape culture, preserve memory, and imagine new possibilities. From 2011-2017 she stewarded Omi Gallery at Impact Hub Oakland and in 2017, she founded Ashara Ekundayo Gallery in Oakland - a social practice platform centering Black women of the African Diaspora and creating space for work informed by spirituality and Afrofuturism. She is also the Founder and Executive Creative Director at Artist As First Responder, which recognizes artists as essential to the health and transformation of communities. Her ongoing projects include BLATANT, an experimental publishing project, and the AfroPortals Project Space & Archive, a global platform for immersive, future-facing cultural work. Ekundayo’s curatorial and artistic practice has taken her from the Bay Area to projects and residencies in the United States and internationally. She is currently launching PS_Detroit, a translocal archival and cultural platform devoted to the study, preservation and production of Black creative archives. Ekundayo holds an M.A. in Gender and Social Change from the University of Denver. Sydney Cain received their MFA from Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT (2024), and their BA from San Francisco State University, CA (2021). Exhibitions include Flesh of the Forest, OxyArts, Los Angeles, CA (2025); Crafting Radicality: Bay Area Artists from the Svane Gift, de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2023); Figure Telling: Contemporary Bay Area Figuration, di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, Napa, CA (2023); In Frequencies, Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV (2022); Collective Arising: The Insistence of Black Bay Area Artists, Museum of Sonoma County, Sonoma, CA (2022); Sydney Cain: Refutations, The Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2021) (solo); Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism, Oakland Museum of California, CA (2021); and The Black Woman Is God: Reprogramming That God Code, SOMArts, San Francisco, CA (2016). Cain’s work is included in the collections of the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno, NV; the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; and the Crocker Museum, San Jose, CA. Ayana V. Jackson uses archival impulses to assess the impact of the colonial gaze on the history of photography. By using her lens to deconstruct 19th and early 20th century portraiture, Jackson questions photography’s authenticity and role in perpetuating socially relevant and stratified identities. Jackson’s work is collected by major local and international institutions including The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York, New York), The Newark Museum (Newark, New Jersey), J. P. Morgan Chase Art Collection (New York, New York), Princeton University Art Museum (Princeton, New Jersey), The National Gallery of Victoria (Melbourne, Australia), The Museum of Contemporary Photography (Chicago, Illinois) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (Seattle, Washington). Jackson was a 2014 New York Foundation for the Arts F…