Making [Space]: Artists and Organizers of Black [Space] Residency in Conversation

Museum of the African Diaspora is pleased to present the first in a series of three panel discussions featuring the organizers and artists behind Black [Space] Residency, a physical container for imagination, inquiry, activity and rest for Black creatives located at Minnesota Street Studios. Panelists will include Ashara Ekundayo, Erica Deeman, Ron Saunders, and Binta Ayofemi in conversation about the founding and design of Black [Space] Residency and stewardship of the inaugural resident, the photographer, and former MoAD Emerging Artist Program artist, Chanell Stone. The conversation will be moderated by Elena Gross. MoAD is a supporting partner of Black [Space] Residency.

Ashara Ekundayo is an independent curator, artist, creative industries entrepreneur and organizer working internationally across cultural, spiritual, civic, and social innovation spaces. Through her company AECreative Consulting Partners she places artists and cultural production as essential in equitable design practices, real estate development, and movement-building. Her intersectional worldview offers both an Afrofuturist and radical Black feminist framework to the public sector by centering the lives, traditions, and expertise of Black womxn of the African Diaspora. Ashara.io

Erica Deeman (b. 1977) lives and works in Seattle, WA. Deeman received a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Public Relations, degree in 2000 from Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK, a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Photography, degree in 2014 from Academy of Art, San Francisco, CA and is an MFA Student at UC Berkeley (graduating 2022).

Deeman is the recipient of 2019 Headlands Center for the Arts Residency, Sausalito, CA; a 2016 TOSA Award Finalist; the 2015 ProArts 2 x 2 Solos 2015: Emerging Artists; and the 2015 Working Artists Grant.



Ron Moultrie Saunders is a San Francisco-based photographic artist, landscape architect and teacher who lives in the Bayview neighborhood. He is originally from Jamaica, Queens, New York. His artwork is in the San Francisco Arts Commission Civic Art Collection for works he completed for the San Francisco Library, Linda Brooks-Burton Bayview Branch, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, Laguna Honda Hospital and Public Utilities Commission’s new headquarters in San Francisco. https://www.ronmsaunders.com/

Visual Artist Binta Ayofemi shapes new urban forms and urban materials. Ayofemi’s upcoming upcoming exhibitions Black Space and Black Monuments in 2021.

Ayofemi’s activation of vacant sites, from an urban meadow to a reimagined cornerstore, suggests a state of mutability and transformation. Ayofemi’s first buildings as artwork, COMMONS, GUILD, and YARD open in Spring 2021.

Ayofemi shifts accepted narratives around urban voids, seemingly abandoned structures, and economic displacement, while limning notions of fugitivity, freedom, duration, and Black radical imagination. Ayofemi explores urban material, movement, making, manufacturing, and authorship of public and private space.

Ayofemi’s artwork GROUND, a series of sites and buildings, generates new visual language around urban voids, economy, displacement, abstraction and the senses.


Elena Gross (she/they) is the Curatorial Manager of Exhibitions and Emerging Artists Program at Museum of the African Diaspora and an independent writer and culture critic living in Oakland, CA. She received an MA in Visual & Critical Studies from the California College of the Arts in 2016, and her BA in Art History and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies from St. Mary’s College of Maryland in 2012. She specializes in representations of identity in fine art, photography, and popular media. Elena was formerly the creator and co-host of the arts & visual culture podcast what are you looking at? published by Art Practical. Her research has been centered around conceptual and material abstractions of the body in the work of Black modern and contemporary artists. She has presented her writing and research at institutions and conferences across the U.S., including Nook Gallery, Southern Exposure, KADIST, Harvard College, YBCA, California College of the Arts, and the GLBT History Museum. In 2018, she collaborated with the artist Leila Weefur on the publication Between Beauty & Horror (Sming Sming Books). The two performed a live adaptation of their work at The Lab, San Francisco. Her most recent writing can be found in the publication This Is Not A Gun (Sming Sming Books / Candor Arts) and OutWrite: The Conferences that Shaped LGBTQ Literary Culture, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press, co-edited with Julie R. Enszer.