After weeks of messaging him on every app you can name, the artist and designer Olalekan Jeyifous agreed to meet me at a park in Brooklyn one picturesque afternoon last September. He’s had the kind of schedule lately that’s made it hard to find a few hours to sit for an interview. He was in the middle of preparing an installation for the 2nd Sharjah Architectural Triennial in the United Arab Emirates; he was also finalising his contribution to an upcoming climate-focused group show in Brooklyn; and then there were the three public art projects—in New York, London and Chicago—that were in various stages of development; also, he’d just started co-teaching a graduate seminar on visualisations at Yale’s School of Architecture. 

“So, just busy as shit,” he said, with a laugh.
“It’s always good busy, because I’m a full-time artist, and I’m doing what I love.”

As we strolled along winding paths in the park, a pleasant breeze wafted alongside, taking the edge off
the heat. Soul classics played from Bluetooth speakers as cookouts began, while sunbathers dozed atop blankets spread on the lawns. 

Jeyifous’s eyes are heavy-lidded, giving him an impression of weariness or mild scepticism. He stands around six feet with broad shoulders and a stoic comportment, a thin gold chain swinging from the stems of gold prescription glasses. His locs are often gathered inside a wrap or under a ballcap, and he has a predilection for square-toed motorcycle boots. His attire and mannerisms might be clocked as eccentric somewhere else, but he fades into the fashionable eclecticism of Brooklyn’s Black bohemia. As the day wore on, we’d cross paths with friends running errands who would catch him up on the latest neighbourhood gossip, which Jeyifous seemed to relish, adding commentary and laughter.

Jeyifous has lived and worked here in Brooklyn for a quarter century, and other than the increased demand on his time, not much has changed. He still works in the same monastic fashion that he’s long preferred. Unlike most artists exhibiting at his pace, visibility and scale, he is a one-man operation. No assistants or interns to take on his workload. He sends out work to fabricators when needed. He doesn’t rent a separate design studio, preferring instead to cook up entire installations—like his recent African Conservation Project/All-Africa Protoport, which won the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale—in the same apartment where he cooks his meals.

Perhaps it’s a bit of a paradox that a man who works mostly in a solitary fashion has become one of the more accessible, conversation-starting visual artists of his generation. While savouring recent art world victories, Jeyifous seemed most proud of his less-heralded victories, like creating a cloud-based site of AI-generated assets to combat the erasure of Black people from architectural renderings. 

“When we did our renderings, we had no Black models,” he said, recalling his years as an architecture student. “We had no Black scale figures to put into our scenes. And so I actually spent years accumulating from free sites and paid sites, tons and tons and tons, like 800 Black people figures. And I hit up everyone who teaches at an architecture school…And I said, ‘Give this to all your students so that they never have to spend hours looking for Black people to put in their architectural renderings.’” 

There was an important idea encapsulated in Jeyifous’s use of AI to help insert Black people into the field of architecture, expanding the way students can imagine the world to come. When you think about it, every architectural rendering is a work of near-future science fiction—helping us imagine a thing that has not been built, while reproducing the world in which it must be built.  

Jeyifous’s interventions—in the gallery space, through public art, and on the academic back channels—are part of a long, storied aesthetic tradition of African diasporic technological reinvention. Here we were, after all, fifty years and a train ride away from where Black and Latino youth found a way to make a breakbeat last forever by repurposing technology for aesthetic transcendence. When he describes the tradition that helped birth hip-hop, he might as well be speaking of his own work:
“The idea that against these systems that have marginalised us and have imposed all of these restrictions—I mean, all of these regressive policies around us, how we’re able to navigate those systems and take things and make new things.”

“”
There was an important idea encapsulated in Jeyifous’s use of AI to help insert Black people into the field of architecture, expanding the way students can imagine the world to come. When you think about it, every architectural rendering is a work of near-future science fiction—helping us imagine a thing that has not been built, while reproducing the world in which it must be built.

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Imagine, if you will, that otherworldly diasporic milieu of 1970s New York, when civil rights reforms welcomed a wave of African students, mostly from upper-crust families, to American campuses. Jeyifous’s father was one of them. A Marxist revolutionary studying at New York University, Jeyifous’s father had rejected the pro-British worldview of his colonial police chief father. Meanwhile, Jeyifous’s mother, who is Black American, had fled the stuffiness of Washington DC, to study photography at Parsons School of Design. “They were both black sheeps,” he said of his parents. “She married an African, which was a very controversial thing to do coming from a really middle-class Black family in DC of light-skinned motherfuckers. So she married a dark African from Nigeria.”

In other words, Jeyifous’s story would not have been possible without the previous era’s feedback loop of radical energy circulating between sides of the Atlantic; with Black power and Black feminist movements against American racism and imperialism spurring nation-building projects on the continent, and African freedom fighting inspiring Black American thought and action in the streets of the United States. Intra-racial class dynamics, colonialism, the legacy of slavery, colorism, the long march of civil rights struggle in the Americas, and post-colonial African liberation movements—all were present in the diasporic love story that ushered Jeyifous into existence in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1977, where Jeyifous’s father had moved their family to teach at the University of Ifẹ̀.

But, as was the case with many socialist and internationalist African nation-building projects, the post-colonial period gave way to a turbulent and extractive neocolonial dystopia. In 1983, the family was forced to return to the United States after a military coup removed Nigeria’s President Shehu Shagari from power. 

Growing up between the United States and Nigeria, the images that lingered for Jeyifous were those awe-inspiring aircrafts taking him and his family back and forth across the Atlantic during that golden era of international travel. The aspirational, modernist sheen of African air travel advertisements suffuses African Conservation Project/All-Africa Protoport, when bygone companies like British Caledonia, PanAm and Air Afrique offered children like him tours of the cockpit, colouring books and pins bearing their name. Even the installation’s oversized furniture is an autobiographical gesture, evoking young Jeyifous’s memory of travelling in seats meant for adults. 

After some time in Washington DC near his mother’s family, Jeyifous moved to upstate New York so that his mother could complete a PhD in developmental psychology at Cornell. When it came time for him to attend college, Jeyifous followed her footsteps to Cornell, where he studied architecture, an educational experience he recalls with fondness. Specifically, Cornell’s curriculum encouraged Jeyifous to think outside the box of what was expected of architects in America’s privatised economy. 

“The training we received in our architectural education did not sync with the professional practice,”
he explained. “So many of us who came out of that school have a more expansive architectural practice that defies the tidy designation of just making buildings.”  

One of the most important friendships he formed in the architecture progamme was with classmate Amanda Williams, the architect-turned-artist and MacArthur genius with whom he often collaborates. After graduation, Jeyifous secured a job—“a really dope job”—working for DBox, a cutting-edge architectural visualisation firm known for their computer renderings of large-scale urban development projects. Though he liked the job, which helped shape his cunning use of design software, he quickly grew disillusioned with the culture and structure of the corporate environment. “Fundamentally, the idea of having to go to an office and have a 9-to-5 just was never going to work for me.”

So, with the moral support of his parents, he quit. “I come from a family that says, ‘No, you do whatever you want to do in this life.’” he says. For almost twenty years now, Jeyfious has done just that, refusing the architecture office to devote himself to his computer-based art and design practice, building on what he’d learned as an architectural visualiser to design imagined urban landscapes as well as real-world public art projects. 

For many years, as he toiled with increasingly sophisticated software in his Brooklyn apartment, and without the stability of a steady paycheck, Jeyifous struggled to make ends meet. He recalls often being “broke as shit” and having to go on food stamps to weather stretches without a commission. But he had a computer, a shelf of science fiction novels and a deepening interest in the way advances in digital technology were shaping humanity—and how the latter might be mobilised to reconstruct alternate realities for the African diaspora.

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The question of how technology will be used to advance African diasporic world-building is one that seems to animate Jeyifous’s approach to reimagining Black geographies. Much like the social critique embedded in the science fiction novels that inspire his art, his auteur’s approach to world-building is far from techno-utopian fantasy, though the lush beauty of their surfaces might lead some to believe otherwise. 

Problems of the African present—displacement, resource plundering, labour exploitation, climate fallout—remain as tensions in his speculative urbanism, including African Conservation Project/All-Africa Protoport, which is imposed upon Zambia’s Barotse floodplain, amid the indigenous lands of the Lozi people. “If we make this massive African expansionist world,” he wondered aloud, “what is sacrificed towards that end?” For Jeyifous, it’s not the answers to such questions that matter, but the questions themselves that guide his vibrant visual language and storytelling. “There’s no tidy resolution to whatever we’re trying to fix.”

Perhaps the most misunderstood feature of Jeyifous’s work is its complicated interplay between Afro-futuristic imagining and its scepticism about the possibility of true techno-utopias, a scepticism that seems in part rooted in his attitude towards science fiction as a genre. “Any sci-fi that exists in the West that imagines flying cars from the Jetsons to Star Trek is fundamentally rooted in colonialism and the extraction of resources,” he said. Even when those utopian narratives tilt towards the dystopian, Jeyifous knows, they offer a numbing escapism to contemporary struggle. “It allows white people to pretend that these are the conditions they faced, when it’s our reality, our actual material conditions.”
Or, as the writer Greg Tate once put it: “Black people live the estrangement that science fiction writers imagine”.

His stunning realistic, digitally-rendered worlds embody these tensions: they do not promise Silicon Valley-type solutions for past, present and future conditions as much as they pose questions about African diasporic conditions. For example, his work’s catalogue copy refrains from the speculative phrasings common to such futuristic work—e.g., “This project imagines…” Instead, descriptions transform past possibilities into new historical realities. Indigenous knowledge systems were applied a generation ago in the wake of colonial damage, and now a network of no-emission travel hubs across the diaspora exists. In other words, because the artist has re-narrativised and visualised a way for the African diaspora to travel and exchange knowledge, it already does so—on an alternate timeline. 

“It’s a massive world in my mind with a million stories going on,” he said. “But I have to distil it down to a series of images and models and a video that tries to capture what I see very clearly.”

This can be as unsettling as it is transcendent, both for those who may mistake him for an uncritical proponent of extractive technologies, like artificial intelligence, and those who question why his otherwise beautiful Afro-futures are so rife with imperfection and continued struggle: spacecrafts featuring rusted hulls, subway systems overgrown with native flora and skyscrapers made of thatch and corrugated metal. It can be frustrating for those longing for a vision of African utopias as well as those hoping Jeyifous might serve as an ambassador for the kinds of advanced AI software he has been using for years to create his visualisations and sculptures. “For me, my ability to synergise and sync things is what my actual art is. It’s not anything I’ve ever made,” he said. “My IP is the way I think.”

“”
This can be as unsettling as it is transcendent, both for those who may mistake him for an uncritical proponent of extractive technologies, like artificial intelligence, and those who question why his otherwise beautiful Afro-futures are so rife with imperfection and continued struggle: spacecrafts featuring rusted hulls, subway systems overgrown with native flora and skyscrapers made of thatch and corrugated metal.

The critiques that seem to hit him the hardest revolve around the particulars of how his visualisations represent Black diasporic futures. Some Lagosian viewers of Shanty Mega-Structures of Lagos, Nigeria, which portrays stylized eco-towers of salvaged metal amid the bustling metropolis, confronted him about “making ruin porn for the consumption of Western media,” while a student in the audience of a recent lecture called him out for recreating a Eurocentric, slender body type for the African flight attendants of ACP/AAP. Jeyifous seems to take these critiques seriously, and in fact, if there is one corrective that the artist seems to support for Afrofuturistic advancement, it is this capacity to accept valid, good-faith critique. “I mean, we’re not going to recreate the most fucked up ills of white supremacy, which is genocide and all that,” he said. “But we’re going to create some displacement, some whatever, you know what I mean? But we have to be able to respond to criticism openly and in good faith.”

He is realistic about the material limitations of such representations of the future. Jeyifous’s worlds are so convincingly rendered, it can feel as though they are attempting to speak for the aspirations of a community, a people, or even the entire Black diaspora. “I don’t have a social practice,” he explained, referring to the concept of creating work in transparent collaboration with a community. “I’m the one writing these stories.” 

Eventually, Jeyifous and I arrived on the patio of a nearby bar, a few blocks away from the park. He recognised one of the patrons and the two exchanged a friendly greeting. Soon, we found our own stools outside, sipping beer and watching the lively foot traffic of Bedford-Stuyvesant as the sun began to set. 

“So much of our experience as just Black African diasporic folks throughout modern history is navigating repurposing things—and flipping it, remaking it, you know what I mean?” said Jeyifous, picking at a to-go clamshell of Jamaican food he’d just bought from a nearby vendor. Flipping and remaking holds true for his own work, both for the tools he repurposes for production as well as his attitude towards revising created pieces. “I have no problem rehashing a project over and over again, a million times, a million ways.” 

As he revisited some of the criticisms he’s fielded for his work, I began to wonder if maybe there was a way that this rehashing of constructed worlds might be connected to the way audiences have understood and responded to his storytelling. I also wonder how that feedback loop of audience interaction will impact his work in the years to come as he exhibits more widely and prepares to see a major public art project—a collaboration with Williams—rise in his own backyard: a stylised statue in Brooklyn’s largest park of the New York City political trailblazer Shirley Chisolm.

Jeyifous seems eager for the opportunity to engage audiences beyond the art world. His narrative-driven visual storytelling invites broad engagement. Indeed, he’s one of those rare visual artists who has a piece that has been optioned for cinematic adaptation by a television studio, and rumour has it that his work was also one of the inspirations for the CGI cityscapes of Marvel’s Black Panther. “I was told that I was absolutely on the mood board,” he said of the film, which is set in the imagined African nation of Wakanda.

The film is just one example of the new connections being forged between Africa and its diasporas, connections that leave Jeyifous cautiously optimistic about the fate of a rapidly transforming continent in a multipolar world. “I want Black folks throughout the diaspora to be connected, to see the connection. There were Black folks who would never go to Africa, who would never think of vacationing anywhere on the continent, who have gone there now…But you have to be careful of what you’re building. It can quickly create an entire extractive tourist class of Black Americans on the continent, because that’s what capital fundamentally does.”

He returned to the idea of good-faith dialogue, the ability to receive and incorporate legitimate criticisms, a cornerstone of his own process. He expands this idea of critique out to the social and political, highlighting how exploitative technologies like social media help make debate so difficult. How might new technologies of disagreement be sustained in the streets and villages of the continent? Jeyifous is pragmatic about the artist’s limited role in helping to envision answers to the diaspora’s most critical questions. “I think it’s important in that you have artists and creatives, and that it’s not just number crunchers and policy people,” he said. 

But he acknowledges the centrality of material conditions, which work like his only improves if it helps us understand why we have arrived on this timeline as opposed to any number of others. “I am on the side of those who have done the research and the legwork, the sociologists who have all of the information that says: ‘No, Black folks! Black capitalism is not going to save us at all.’”