Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura

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The San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC) Main Gallery is excited to present "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura," a group exhibition that asks what if the past, present, and future were not separate places, but worlds we could inhabit at the same time? Curated by Ashara Ekundayo, the exhibition brings together the work of Sydney Cain, Ayana V. Jackson, Courtney Desiree Morris, and bryant terry.

"Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura" opens on October 8, 2026, at the SFAC Main Gallery in the War Memorial Veterans Building and will be on view through January 30, 2027. 

The artists in the exhibition invite visitors into a world where time does not move neatly forward. Memory folds into the present, the future reaches back toward the past, and ancestral knowledge becomes a means of imagining what might still be possible.

Drawing from author, artist, and activist Dr. Rasheedah Phillips’ thinking on Black temporalities, as well as Dogon and other African cosmologies, "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura" considers time outside of conventional Western ideas of linear progression. Black memory moves around generations, carrying knowledge, ritual, nourishment, and possibility with it.

Throughout the exhibition, objects, images, sounds, seeds, recipes, and gestures become things we might carry between worlds. They suggest both survival and continuity: what we preserve, what sustains us, how we adorn, and what we pass forward. The journey may take us somewhere new, but we are neither the first to travel it nor the last.

The exhibition’s title invokes one of the most important Black figures in the history of American popular media and science fiction: Nyota Uhura, the Starfleet communications officer portrayed by Nichelle Nichols in the original "Star Trek" television series.

When Nichols appeared on American television in1966, the image of a Black woman in space, in the future, and occupying the bridge of the Starship Enterprise was revolutionary. Uhura was intelligent, capable, composed, and essential to the functioning of the ship. As the communications officer and master translator, she connected beings across languages, cultures, and worlds. That role takes on new meaning in "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura."

At a moment when history itself is increasingly contested, Uhura becomes a symbol of transmission: of carrying knowledge from one world, one generation, and one reality into another. The exhibition asks who safeguards Black memory, how it travels, and what must be carried forward so that it is not lost.

Music and literature also shape the exhibition’s atmosphere. Ben Okri’s "The Famished Road," the spiritual compositions of Alice Coltrane and Sun Ra, and Stevie Wonder’s "Saturn" offer parallel ways of thinking about journeys between worlds, memory, spirituality, and possibility.

Ultimately, "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura" is an exhibition about time, but it is also about freedom. What becomes possible when Black history is not confined to the past? What if memory is something active, capable of traveling across generations and helping us imagine worlds that do not yet exist? In Ekundayo’s vision, Black memory is not simply something to preserve. It is something we carry.

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