There Are Black People in the Future. So goes a phrase coined by artist Alisha B. Wormsley. It’s a provocative statement, in part because it seems both obvious—why wouldn’t Black people exist in the future?—and interested in challenging the notion that they might not. For Olalekan Jeyifous, a Brooklyn-based architect and artist, the question of where Black people might exist, both geographically and otherwise, resides squarely at the center of his work. In both large-scale public art and speculative architecture, he imagines other worlds, sometimes layered right on top of this one, and what the spaces we occupy say about us and society.

KYLA MARSHELL: Your work has been described as futurist, or Afrofuturist. Do you identify as such?

Olalekan Jeyifous: Not really; but I’m not ...