A sonic pslam: artist talk

Join SFAC Galleries for an evening with the artists of "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura." The exhibiting artists will speak about their practice, as well as the sonic and poetic dimension of their works in the exhibition. 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 Fellow for Photography and the recipient of the 2018 Smithsonian Fellowship.

Courtney Desiree Morris is a visual and performance artist and associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her mediums include large-format portraiture and landscape photography, experimental video, performance art, and installation art. Thematically, her work is concerned with ancestral memory, African-based spiritual traditions, ecology, black place-making, and the everyday ritual aesthetics of diasporic communities. She explores how we inhabit places and how places come to inhabit us. As a scholar, her work examines Black and Indigenous women’s social movements in Latin America and the Caribbean; authoritarianism and Latin American statecraft; race, energy, and environmental politics in the African Diaspora; and Black feminist/queer aesthetics and visual culture. She is the author of To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua (Rutgers University Press, 2023).

Bryant Terry is a multidisciplinary artist, chef, publisher, and author whose practice bridges cooking, sculpture, sound, video, and social practice to explore resilience, cultural memory, and liberation. From 2015 to 2022, he served as the inaugural Chef-in-Residence at San Francisco’s Museum of the African Diaspora, curating programming connecting food, health, farming, art, and activism. His work and ideas have been presented at institutions including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, The Underground Museum, and the Hammer Museum at UCLA. Terry is the founder and editor-in-chief of 4 Color Books, an imprint of Ten Speed Press/Penguin Random House, and the author of five acclaimed cookbooks. His honors include a James Beard Award and an NAACP Image Award. Terry received his MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2025 and holds an MA in History from NYU.