Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura

SAN FRANCISCO – 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.  

“Art is a conversation across time and space that can carry our collective stories and memories from one generation to the next,” said Matthew Goudeau, Executive Director of Arts and Culture. “Through exhibitions such as Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura, the Arts Commission is proud to provide a platform for artists and creatives like curator Ashara Ekundayo to challenge how we understand art and to remind us that the future is something we can actively create today.” 

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. 

“Like Uhura tuning her frequencies across interstellar static, we are called to decode the electric signals embedded within our lineages,” states exhibition curator Ashara Ekundayo. “Together, these works function as archaeological scriptures, poetic, mystical, and instructive, informing how the exhibition engages in ritual knowledge, cosmology, and the technologies needed to navigate multiple temporal and spatial realities.”  

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. 

“We are so excited to bring Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura to the SFAC Main Gallery,” said Jackie Im, SFAC’s Associate Curator. “This exhibition transforms the gallery and transports viewers, encouraging us to think expansively on how we exist alongside our past and future selves and how that can inform how we move through the world today. I am thrilled to bring the vision developed by Ashara, Sydney, Ayana, Courtney, and Bryant to the gallery.” 

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. 

About the Curator
Ashara Ekundayo 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. 

About the Artists
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. 

Exhibition Details
Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura
October 8, 2026 – January 30, 2027 
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building 
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA 94102 
Wednesday – Saturday, noon – 5 p.m. 
Free and open to the public 

Opening Reception Details
Thursday, October 8, 6 – 8 p.m. (Remarks at 6:30 p.m.) 
SFAC Main Gallery, War Memorial Veterans Building 
401 Van Ness Avenue, Suite 126, San Francisco, CA, 94102 
No reservation required. Free and open to the public. 

PUBLIC PROGRAMMING DETAILS
All programs are free and open to the public. For more information, visit sf.gov/excavating-uranus-a-psalm-for-nyota-uhura.

Both Space and Time, a Black Feminist Continuum
Wednesday, October 7, 2026 | 6:00 – 7:30 p.m. 
SF Main Library, Koret Audiotorium 
100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, CA 94102 

Black women have long shaped, defined and defied time and space through labor, travel, translation and the quiet stewardship of knowledge; hear from artists in the forthcoming SFAC gallery show, Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura, whose works function as archaeological scriptures, poetic, mystical and instructive, informing how the exhibition engages ritual knowledge, cosmology and the technologies needed to navigate multiple temporal and spatial realities.Panelists include Sydney Cain, Ashara Ekundayo, and Courtney Desiree Morris, moderated by Cheryl Derricotte. 

This program is part of the Power & Public Memory: Shaping Legacy Program series. 

View preview images of "Excavating Uranus, A Psalm for Nyota Uhura" on Flickr

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About the San Francisco Arts Commission
The San Francisco Arts Commission is the City agency that champions the arts as essential to daily life by investing in a vibrant arts community, enlivening the urban environment and shaping innovative cultural policy. Our programs include: Civic Art Collection, Civic Design Review, Community Investments, Film SF, Grants for the Arts, Public Art, SFAC Galleries, and Art Vendor Licensing. To learn more, visit sf.gov/artscommission