Key Jo Lee, Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), San Francisco, reflects on how ‘UNBOUND’ redefines Blackness through cosmology, science fiction, and ancestral vision
David Alabo, The Boy Who Held the World on His Head, 2020. Archival pigment print on Hahnemühle photorag, 48″ x 24″ x 2″. Courtesy of the artist
Now on view at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, ‘UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe’ transforms the institution into a cosmic vessel of thought and creation. Curated by Key Jo Lee, MoAD’s Chief of Curatorial Affairs and Public Programs, the exhibition brings together artists from across the African Diaspora whose practices move between metaphysics, spirituality, and speculative futures. Through painting, installation, photography, sculpture, and digital media, ‘UNBOUND’ invites audiences to consider Blackness as both origin and horizon, a field of imagination that mirrors the vastness of the cosmos. Key Jo Lee reflects on curating across space and time, the architecture of MoAD as a metaphor for ascent, and how the exhibition reclaims imagination as an act of freedom.
Stephan Rheeder: The ‘UNBOUND’ exhibition, a unique exploration of cosmic themes and the conceptual boundaries of Blackness, has been described as “reaching beyond Earth, both literally and metaphorically.” How do you see this distinctive approach reflected in the curatorial vision and the artworks presented?
Key Jo Lee: At a moment when many institutions are retreating from equity-centred commitments, ‘UNBOUND’ insists on expansiveness. It begins from the premise that Blackness has always been cosmological, that artists of African descent have long turned to the stars, to water, to darkness itself as materials of thought. The show’s premise is both aesthetic and political: to affirm that Black artists have never needed permission to imagine otherwise.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
Each artist approaches the cosmos from a distinct vantage shaped by lineage, geography, and philosophy. Nigerian-American artist Mikael Owunna transforms photographic portraiture into portals of light and myth, merging engineering precision with Yoruba spirituality to create radiant, star-spangled figures whose bodies seem to constellate into being. His work collapses the distance between science and ceremony, offering the body itself as a celestial archive. Moroccan-Ghanaian visual artist David Alabo, meanwhile, brings the speculative and surreal into dialogue with Afrofuturist cosmology. His digitally rendered dreamscapes use colour, pattern, and impossible architecture to envision worlds where African identities are constantly in flux, with the future not as an escape from history but as its reconfiguration.
The curatorial vision of ‘UNBOUND’ rests on that invitation: to see the universe as a space of Black thought, and to recognise that these artists are not merely reflecting cosmic knowledge but generating it. Through their work, the cosmos becomes a site of self-definition, intellectual rigour, and radical imagination.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
You divide the show into realms such as the Geo-Cartographic and the Techno-Cyborgian. How did these themes develop, and how do they help audiences navigate such a wide-ranging show?
The three realms emerged from a desire to map the multiplicity of Black world-making across time and geography. They are conceptual rather than hierarchical, allowing audiences to move through the exhibition as if traversing a constellation rather than a linear path.
The Geo-Cartographic realm locates the ground, the ways artists chart land, belonging, and displacement across both earthly and celestial terrains. Works like Didier William’s Dark Shores make that connection visceral. His carved wood panels shimmer between topography and flesh, history and horizon, transforming the surface into both map and membrane that holds the residue of migration and the memory of water.
Harmonia Rosales, Creation Story, 2021. Oil and genuine silver leaf on wood panel, 53.5″ x 79″ x 3.75″. Courtesy of the Zimmer Family Collection.
The Religio-Mythic realm turns toward cosmology and origin. Artists here engage ancestral technologies and reimagine creation stories as living texts. Harmonia Rosales’s Creation Story re-centres classical iconography through Yoruba cosmology, portraying orishas Obatala and Yemaya as divine architects of humanity. Her gilded compositions collapse the distance between Western art history and African spiritual lineage, proposing a visual theology in which Blackness itself is sacred matter.
The Techno-Cyborgian realm looks forward to the merging of organic and synthetic, body and machine, spirit and code. Rashaad Newsome’s In the Absence of Evidence, We Create Stories stands at this threshold. His holographic African mask fuses digital technology with ancestral form, suggesting that technology, when shaped through a diasporic lens, can become a vessel for cultural transmission rather than erasure.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
Together, these realms are not boundaries but orbits. They offer visitors an interpretive map while allowing for drift and resonance across categories, an exhibition that invites navigation, not conclusion.
With such a diverse range of artists, how do you strike a balance between maintaining a strong curatorial voice and giving each artist’s perspective its due space?
My curatorial approach is rooted in what I call perceptual drift, an ethics of looking that privileges multiplicity, pacing, and reciprocity. ‘UNBOUND’ is not about producing a single curatorial argument; it’s about building a gravitational field strong enough for many voices to coexist. Each artist brings their own cosmology. My task is to make their orbits legible to one another without forcing alignment.
To hold that balance, the exhibition’s interpretive design moves between the collective and the singular. Discursive wall panels, such as Black Holes and Black Space: Collapse, Density, Emergence, serve as connective tissue, weaving artists together through shared metaphors married with scientific theory. These texts invite visitors to think relationally across works, to notice how Torkwase Dyson transforms histories of spatial confinement into architectures of liberation, or how Rodney Ewing’s and Cullen Washington Jr.’s experiments collapse cosmic and historical density into new visual grammars of freedom.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
Alongside these collective frames are individual labels that return attention to each artist’s specific voice. Together, these interpretive modes enact perceptual drift in real time, moving between intimacy and expansiveness, between a single artwork and the larger constellation of thought that frames it.
The architecture of the Museum of the African Diaspora, with its three floors and vertical flow, seems to shape the exhibition’s experience. How did this layout influence your design and curatorial flow?
MoAD’s architecture shaped every aspect of ‘UNBOUND’. The museum rises rather than expands, a vertical vessel that asks visitors to move through the exhibition as an act of ascension. That verticality became both metaphor and method: each floor offers a different atmospheric density, a shift in light and colour that echoes the movement from ground to sky, from gravity to flight.
Rather than treating the museum’s intimacy as a limitation, we made it a feature. The scale allows for intensified encounters with monumental works; the viewer’s proximity amplifies immersion and presence. Large pieces feel enveloping rather than diminished, pressing into the architecture in ways that feel bodily and celestial at once.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
The design, developed with the team at McCalman Co., translated these architectural realities into an aesthetic language. The gradient colour palette, inspired by James Webb Space Telescope images of Jupiter, carries visitors through turbulence and beauty. Wayfinding and environmental design were treated as instruments of motion, guiding visitors through a perceptual drift that mirrors the exhibition’s cosmological flow. In this way, architecture and design become curatorial collaborators, making visible the belief that limitation can generate intensity, that Black thought, like the cosmos, flourishes through motion and continual transformation.
Beyond the gallery walls, ‘UNBOUND’ includes performances, conversations, and workshops. Why is public programming so central to this project?
For ‘UNBOUND’, public programming isn’t an accessory; it’s an extension of the exhibition’s logic. The performances, conversations, and workshops allow the show’s ideas to live in motion, embodied through sound, voice, and collective presence. They transform the museum from a site of display into a site of gathering and inquiry.
On the opening night, audiences were invited into Irresistibly Alive, a performance conceived by M. Carmen Lane and Sidra Leigh Bell, with dancer Sophia Halimah Parker and costume designer Mark Eric. Summoning ancestral presence through movement, voice, and ritual, the piece asked what gestures of freedom might look like within a cosmic frame. It collapsed time and space into a collective moment of witness, where each body — viewer and performer alike — became a portal.
In this way, programs like Irresistibly Alive embody the spirit of ‘UNBOUND’, extending its meditation on cosmology, imagination, and Black speculative futures into lived experience. They remind us that imagination is not only expansive but a practice of liberation.
Installation view of ‘UNBOUND’ at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD). Courtesy of Museum of the African Diaspora. Photo: Josef Jacques
This show asks big questions about space, freedom, and identity. What impact do you hope it has on visitors, especially those who might not usually see themselves reflected in cosmic narratives?
I hope ‘UNBOUND’ allows visitors, especially those who have been told their stories are earthbound, to experience themselves as part of the universe’s architecture. To stand before these works and feel that Blackness is not peripheral but central to how we understand creation, matter, and possibility.
More than anything, I want people to leave with curiosity, to test their perceptions in conversation with the art and with one another. The exhibition is designed to slow perception, to invite wonder, and to model what it means to look again, to notice the unseen, the unspoken, the infinite.
In a cultural climate defined by contraction, ‘UNBOUND’ is an act of expansion, a reminder that imagination itself is a form of freedom, and that curiosity can be a deeply ethical way of being in the world.
‘UNBOUND: Art, Blackness, and the Universe’ is on view from October 1, 2025, to August 16, 2026, at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, USA. For more information, visit moadsf.org.
