Black Women//Over Dreaming: A Memory Site | January 16 - 24, 2027

The Black Women//Over Breathing: A Memory Site is an eight-day pop-up in San Francisco's Tenderloin is a confluence. BlackMaria II, founded by Maria Judice as a home for Black cinema and the archival practices that sustain it, and the AfroPortals Project Space & Archive (AfroPortals) a platform housed within and stewarded by the Artist As First Responder collective.

Both organizations have spent years building parallel infrastructures for Black cultural memory, one through the moving image, the other through a broader archive of objects, relationships, and borderless exchange. This pop-up is the first time these two infrastructures share a single room for a sustained run, and that convergence is the real occasion here, as much as any individual program within it.

Sited in a neighborhood that has long held Black, Queer, and immigrant survival with a tenderness the rest of the city rarely extends it, the space is conceived as an archive, a stage, and a sanctuary. Its name, Black Women//Over Breathing, is drawn from the influential movement and creative concept developed by photographer and artist Adrian Octavius Walker, centering the fundamental value, protection, expertise, and prioritization of Black women. During San Francisco Art Week, Judice and Ekundayo, alongside special guests, activate this intimate sanctuary dedicated to Black creative labor, archival inquiry, and restorative pleasure. All bodies, all genders, all ages are welcome.

Throughout the week, the space becomes a multi-sensory portal built around four types of activations. The Archival Reading Room, drawing on AfroPortals' holdings alongside BlackMaria II's own collection, gathers Black art books, zines, and print ephemera for slow research and quiet fellowship. The Microcinema Altar, anchored in BlackMaria II's founding commitment to Black classic and experimental cinema, offers continuous screenings that treat light and shadow as tools for memory-keeping and speculative dreaming. A Visual Art & Site Intervention exhibition grounds the room in visual sovereignty and tactile beauty through site-specific work and photography. And the Sonic Resonation rituals will carry a live and DJ-curated soundscape from spiritual jazz to vinyl selections, using frequency deliberately to settle overstimulated nervous systems and cultivate ease, joy and a stone cold groove.

For Ekundayo and AfroPortals, this partnership extends a translocal archival practice built across years of connecting Oakland to a wider ecosystem of community-based archives, now finding a sibling infrastructure in Judice's own decades of stewarding Black film culture. For Judice and BlackMaria II, it is an opportunity to let the microcinema breathe inside a larger architecture of rest, reset, research, and sound rather than standing alone. Neither organization could build this particular room by itself. That is the point.

Black Women//Over Breathing is a room with no requirement, built by two archivists that have long understood memory as infrastructure, and breath as its most basic, most radical maintenance.

Black space is not empty, it is, inherently, an architecture of refuge.

The Black Women//Over Breathing: A Memory Site pop-up is ALSO occurring in conjunction with the exhibition "Excavating Uranus: A Psalm for Nyota Uhura" on view through January 30, 2027 at the SFAC Main Galleries, War Memorial Blg, SF CA. Artists: Sydney Cain, Ayana V. Jackson, Courtney Desiree Morris and Bryant Terry - Curated by Ashara Ekundayo

Images:

Struck One 1 - Ashara Ekundayo, 2026

Spotted Iyawo 1 - Ashara Ekundayo, 2025

BlackMaria II - SF Tenderloin, 2026

BlackMaria II Microcinema - San Francisco, 2026