Why Afrospatialism™ Is Personal: Migration, Memory, and Black LA
The Personal Heritage of NOMMO’s Founder, Tyree Boyd-Pates, and the Legacy of Afrospatialism™ in Los Angeles, California
Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin of Nonstndrd Creative Projects (left) and Tyree Boyd-Pates of NOMMO Cultural Strategies (right) at LA Design Festival ‘25 in DTLA.
Last week, we introduced Afrospatialism™, our newest framework for reimagining Black space, and shared how it made its debut at the 2025 LA Design Festival.
This week, we explore the personal and cultural roots of Afrospatialism™ through the lived histories of NOMMO’s founder, Tyree Boyd-Pates, and his creative collaborator and Uncle, Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin of Nonstndrd Creative Projects.
At NOMMO, our work is rooted in the legacy of Black America. For both Kwasi and Tyree, Afrospatialism™ is more than a framework. It is an inheritance, shaped by their families’ journeys as part of the Great Migration, when millions of Black Americans moved westward in search of refuge and possibility. For their family and other Black Angelenos, that journey culminated in Los Angeles, CA. But their families’ dream, persisted.
As Tyree shares:
“Our families weren’t just moving. They were fleeing. And what they hoped for wasn’t just survival. They imagined something freer for us. Afrospatialism is our way of protecting that dream.”
The Great Migration (% of U.S African American Population).
We approach our practice as sons of the Great Migration—that 20th-century exodus movement in which more than six million Black Southerners fled Jim Crow in search of safety, autonomy, and possibility. Our family was part of that historic exodus, guided by the quiet courage and vision of our matriarchs.
When Kwasi’s mother and Tyree’s grandmother arrived in South Central Los Angeles with her children in the 1980s, she carried more than just their belongings. She held onto an audacious hope that, as a Black family, they might live freer, fuller lives out West. For their matriarch, who was raised in Riceboro and Savannah, Georgia, during the era of American apartheid -when “Whites Only” signs barred her from water fountains, libraries, and public dignity, Los Angeles offered a sense of relief and promise that differed from both the South and the hustle of Northern cities like New York and Chicago.
Central Avenue street scene, Federal Writers' Project, 1939 Los Angeles Public Library
Feb. 18, 1986: A Los Angeles Police Department battering ram sits next to a South Los Angeles home damaged during a police raid.(Jack Gaunt / Los Angeles Times)
But Los Angeles was never a promised land. Like so many Black migrants to the city, our families encountered new forms of spatial exclusion: redlining, white flight, freeway construction, police violence during the War on Drugs, disinvestment, and, more recently, gentrification. And still, in neighborhoods like Crenshaw, Inglewood, Compton, Altadena, and even in unexpected pockets like Hollywood, Black families like theirs carved out vibrant communities and enclaves. These places remain sites of resistance, survival, and cultural brilliance, despite divestments.
After living in South Los Angeles, Tyree’s family relocated to the Koreatown neighborhood of East Hollywood, a densely populated area with a rich cultural and business history. There, he experienced the 1992 Los Angeles Uprisings firsthand, witnessing the clash of economic frustration, racial injustice, and civic neglect among the city’s diverse communities both during and in the wake of the civil rebellion. These early experiences shaped his path and laid the foundation for the language he would later develop as a historian and museum curator, as evident in his exhibitions, where he showcased the Black experience in Los Angeles within museum spaces. Tyree translated community concerns into spatial stories, using Afrofuturism to envision Black histories and futures where Black lives are not secondary but central to city, state, and national narratives. Notably, through his debut exhibition, "No Justice, No Peace, LA 1992," held in 2017 at the California African American Museum, he showcased his afrospatial work.
“Curation became my protest. Afrospatialism is the vocabulary I built to honor our ancestors while fighting for our right to remain, to dream, and to be seen in full.” — Tyree Boyd-Pates
“No Justice, No Peace, LA 1992” exhibit at the California African American Museum, 2017, curated by Tyree Boyd-Pates.
This is why Afrospatialism™ matters. It reflects on what Black Los Angeles has been, and reimagines what it can become. It invites us to dream, design, and defend Black space as sacred, inherited, and future-facing. Its lineage draws from creative ancestors like architect Paul R. Williams and writer Octavia E. Butler, who both imagined Black presence where it had been erased or unacknowledged.
Through NOMMO and Nonstndrd, both honor those who came before us, and lay a foundation for those to follow from LA and beyond. These futures are not only desired. They are reimagined to hold and maintain Black space with power and purpose beyond spatial confines.
Download the Afrospatialism™ Manifesto and discover how we’re reclaiming Black space through design, memory, and imagination here. Next week, we will reveal what incorporating Afrospatialism into practice looks like.
Afrospatialism™ at LA Design Festival ‘25: Redefining Black Geographies with Memory, Resistance, and Imagination
Presenting Afrospatialism™, NOMMO’s latest framework
NOMMO Cultural Strategies is proud to share our latest framework, Afrospatialism™, a multidisciplinary framework for reimagining, repositioning, and reclaiming Black space, geographies, and topographies. Coined and introduced publicly by NOMMO’s founder, Tyree Boyd-Pates, during the 2025 LA Design Festival’s “Design Futurism” series, Afrospatialism™ offers a new lens and practice rooted in resistance, memory, and speculative imagination.
Afrospatialism™ emerges from the spatial politics of Black urban life and the philosophical legacy of Afrofuturism. Anchored in the futuristic ethos of Black Angeleno architect Paul R. Williams and speculative fiction icon Octavia E. Butler, a Black Angeleno, this framework centers Black spatial thinking as a site of both historical erasure and radical possibility.
Paul R. Williams
Octavia E. Butler
Traditional architectural and urbanist discourses have long marginalized Black geographies. Afrospatialism™ reclaims that ground and invites new imaginaries where Black communities hold agency over how and where they live, move, gather, and dream, past, present, and future.
At a time when Black space, memory, and imagination face threats from displacement, erasure, and cultural commodification, Afrospatialism™ provides a language and worldview for envisioning more liberated and equitable futures.
Far from a static concept, Afrospatialism™ is a dynamic and evolving process. It emphasizes active preservation through storytelling, visual culture, historical reflection, and cultural strategies that engage communities and honor their roots.
NOMMO’s first stop in illustrating Afrospatial thought was at the LA Design Festival 2025 in Los Angeles in June 2025…
LADF ‘25: Afrospatialism™: Reimagining Black Los Angeles w/ Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin and Tyree Boyd-Pates
On June 29, 2025, NOMMO Cultural Strategies, in collaboration with photographer and designer Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin of Nonstndrd Creative Projects, presented Afrospatialism™: Reimagining Black Los Angeles at Row DTLA’s mainstage as part of the LA Design Festival’s "Design Futurism" series.
This session brought together dozens of attendees for a multidimensional exploration of Black space in Los Angeles- past, present, and speculative future. Together, we grounded the conversation in the core principles of Afrospatialism™, while tracing the lineage of Black Los Angeles, from the Los Pobladores of 1781 to the Central Avenue jazz clubs, the battles against redlining, and contemporary gentrification.
Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin shared selections from his and Tyree’s Black Space Project, which documents historically Black neighborhoods in transition. His photography, inspired in part by the Curbed LA Green Book project, confronts themes of redevelopment, memory, and cultural resilience. He also debuted new speculative design work from Nonstndrd Creative’s photo-based architectural drawings and visual reinterpretations of Los Angeles landmarks along MLK Boulevard and beyond.
The conversation culminated in a dialogue between Kwasi and Tyree Boyd-Pates on how Afrospatialism™ can serve as a practical worldview for artists, educators, and urban planners working to protect and reimagine Black space.
As the threat to Black geographies continues to grow, this moment reminded us: imagining and protecting Black space is not only preservation, it’s an act of liberation.
Read Part 2 next week to learn how Afrospatialism™ is rooted in Black family history, migration, and cultural memory…