Niyah’s Multiverse: Chicago’s Afrofuturist Lineage from Sun Ra to Adler Planetarium

Walk into the dome at the Adler Planetarium and meet Niyah—a curious Chicago pre-teen with headphones—who slips across parallel universes like catching a Red Line transfer. Niyah and the Multiverse, the Adler’s latest sky show, is a dazzling Afrofuturist journey through science, identity, and imagination. It’s playful and profound: masks as metaphors for identity, the blues as physics, and the timeless question every child asks—Where do I belong in the cosmos?

This production isn’t just a clever update to planetarium programming. It’s a homecoming. Chicago has been imagining Black futures in domes, rehearsal halls, and community theaters long before the word Afrofuturism was coined.

A Lineage of Cosmic Sound and Vision

In the 1980s, Kelan Phil Cohran—trumpeter, AACM co-founder, and South Side visionary—composed award-winning music for an Adler sky show, turning the dome into a chamber of cosmic resonance. He returned with performances like African Skies in the early 1990s, linking African diasporic sound to celestial imagery. Cohran’s own roots ran back to Sun Ra, who transformed Chicago stages into launchpads for his Arkestra in the 1950s and ’60s. Ra’s “myth-science” and interstellar philosophy established a grammar of Black cosmology that Chicago artists have spoken ever since.

Long before the 1993 coinage of Afrofuturism, Chicagoans were already prototyping it—through music, neighborhood theaters, even community health spaces like Cohran’s Transitions East. They were practicing science fiction in sound and spirit, insisting that Black imagination belonged in every narrative about modernity, atomic energy, and space travel.

Ytasha Womack: Afrofuturist Author, Scriptwriter, Producer

That tradition now continues through Ytasha L. Womack, who co-wrote and produced Niyah and the Multiverse. Womack is internationally known for her 2013 book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture, a definitive primer that helped frame the field for scholars and fans alike.

In March 2025, she released a companion volume, The Afrofuturist Evolution: Creative Paths to Self-Discovery (Chicago Review Press), which transforms Afrofuturism from analysis into lived practice—inviting readers to use rhythm, myth, memory, cosmology, and dance as pathways to healing, imagining, and becoming. It’s both manual and manifesto, extending Afrofuturism into daily life.

Her role in Niyah was to bring that expansive vision directly into the dome. As she explained:

“We wanted to establish that Niyah, being a young girl, has a cultural relationship, as we all do, to space and time, and to explore that through this lens of Afrofuturism.”

She also described the challenge of making complex ideas accessible without diminishing their power:

“Our charge as writers was to talk about these theories and depict them so they’re a point of contemplation for kids and families.”

Through Womack’s lens, Niyah becomes more than science education—it’s an affirmation that Black cultural memory and ancestral imagination belong alongside astrophysics in defining the universe.

Filmmakers in Museums and Planetariums

Niyah also represents a broader shift: filmmakers increasingly turn to museums, galleries, and science institutions as primary venues for ambitious moving-image projects.

• Isaac Julien fills galleries with multiscreen installations like Lessons of the Hour, contextualizing cinema within historical memory.
  
• Arthur Jafa’s Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death spread across museums worldwide as a shared, collective screening event.
  
• Steve McQueen toggles between Academy Award-winning cinema and monumental museum installations, treating both as equal arenas for storytelling.
  

Museums and planetariums provide what Hollywood rarely offers: the ability to experiment with format, duration, and audience immersion. A dome show like Niyah—with its 360° fulldome visuals—could never be realized in a multiplex, but thrives in a science institution willing to blend pedagogy with art.

The Rise of Micro-Cinemas

Alongside museums, micro-cinemas—small, community-run venues—have multiplied as vital spaces for experimental and independent cinema. Chicago has long been a hub:

• Black Cinema House (founded by Theaster Gates’ Rebuild Foundation) turned neighborhood screenings into communal study sessions.
  
• The Nightingale Cinema, an artist-run space, programmed bold independent work for years and even partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art to bring micro-cinema sensibility into institutional space.
  

Across the U.S., places like Brooklyn’s Spectacle Theater or L.A.’s Echo Park Film Center do similar work, proving that grassroots exhibition can thrive outside corporate distribution channels. For Afrofuturist cinema especially, these spaces are crucial—allowing stories that defy Hollywood formulas to be seen, debated, and celebrated.

A Multiverse of Exhibition

Niyah and the Multiverse shows what’s possible when Chicago’s cultural DNA—Sun Ra’s cosmic philosophy, Cohran’s dome scores, AACM’s avant-garde networks—meets museum infrastructure and Afrofuturist scholarship. It’s part of a new exhibition multiverse where stories can premiere in a planetarium, circulate through museums, and reverberate in micro-cinemas, reaching audiences far beyond the multiplex.

In centering a Black Chicago girl as the guide, the Adler’s new show does more than explain physics. It reaffirms what this city has always known: that Black imagination is not an afterthought in science and culture—it’s been one of its architects all along.

Further Viewing/Reading

Niyah and the Multiverse – Adler Planetarium

• Adler Planetarium: Show Info & Tickets — Official event page with schedule and tickets.
• Press Room & Media Kit — Digital press kit with background materials.
• Press Release PDF — Formal press release (January 2024).

Ytasha L. Womack – Afrofuturism & Creative Evolution

• Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture (2013) — Seminal introduction to Afrofuturism, blending history, literature, and pop culture.
• The Afrofuturist Evolution: Creative Paths to Self-Discovery (2025) — Explores Afrofuturism as a framework for wellness, creativity, and transformation.

Kelan Phil Cohran – 

African Skies

 (Adler Planetarium, 1993)

• Discogs Release Entry — Catalog details; notes recording for the Adler Planetarium in 1993.
• Vinyl Edition Details — Notes limited pressing of 1,000 copies with gatefold design.
• Jazz Institute of Chicago (search “African Skies”) — Documents that the composition ran for four years at the Adler sky show.
• Soundohm Catalog — Independent distribution entry confirming Adler recording provenance.
• Context & Review — Commentary on the music’s relationship to Sun Ra and Chicago’s jazz legacy.

Arthur Jafa – 

Love Is the Message, the Message Is Death

 (2016)

• The Met Museum Collection — Official object record with curatorial interpretation.
• Smithsonian American Art Museum — Collection page with description and exhibition context.
• Studio Museum in Harlem — Catalog entry with edition info (1/13 + 2 APs, TRT 7:25).
• Smithsonian Press Release (2020) — Announcement of the coordinated 48-hour global stream.
• MOCA Los Angeles Program — Archive of museum screening.
• Dallas Museum of Art — Featured in the exhibition Truth: 24 frames per second (2017).
• MCA Chicago Collection — Confirms Chicago museum holdings and screenings.

See our Afrofuturism Timeline
https://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/embed/309200/3469216861