A building at 12 Jackson Street SE has been turned into a three-story walk-through exhibition, and it opens to the public Aug. 13. "Mothership Sirius B: What It Was, What It Is, and What It's Gon' Be" comes from Atlanta artist Fabian Williams, who works under the name Occasional Superstar, and his wife and creative partner Sindy Guerrero-Williams. The show will keep ongoing hours Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays, with opening-night tickets sold through isawmothership.com.
The installation holds more than 50 works. Williams made 46 of them himself and collaborated with local artists and students on the rest. Much of the show is built on reimagined movie posters printed with a lenticular process, so the image shifts as a viewer moves past it: one angle shows a rendering of the film's original art, another shows Williams' reworked version and the message he argues was sitting underneath it. He designed the posters digitally and had them produced by a lenticular print shop in New York City. For an artist known mainly as a painter and muralist, the multimedia approach is a departure.
The exhibition is framed as an archive assembled by an alien scout studying Earth the way an anthropologist would, compiling a record of America from midcentury through the 2000s. The name comes from the Dogon people of Mali, who documented the Sirius star system centuries ago. Each floor is a page from that archive. The ground floor recreates midcentury Americana with mint green walls, checkered floors and red vinyl seating, hung with reworked posters for "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "The Twilight Zone," "Planet of the Apes" and "Soylent Green" — films Williams reads as coded treatments of racial paranoia, institutional collapse and the weaponization of science.
The second floor drops the lighting and moves into the 1980s with "RoboCop," "They Live," "Back to the Future" and "Blade Runner," which Williams presents as predictions of the privatization of public life. The 1990s section centers on "Malcolm Morpheus: Matrix Version v.68," a lenticular print that shifts between Morpheus holding out the red and blue pills and Malcolm X in the same pose, with wall text describing Malcolm X as having offered society the red pill of hard truths. A 2000s section of mirrored walls addresses a culture that is watched, tracked and monetized. Also on the floor: a staged kitchen stacked with the shelf-stable groceries of 1980s and 1990s pantries, and a side table shaped like an oversized prescription pill bottle that names OxyContin directly.
The stairwell up to the third floor is lined with original illustrations by students from Morgan Oliver School, Maynard Jackson High School and Georgia Tech, each imagining the Atlanta they want at age 21. The top floor opens at an altar — a gold-leaf painting of Black Jesus above a row of flickering candles — with more depictions of Jesus by Williams and other artists down the hallway. The Garden of Jza room holds collages pairing civil rights figures including Jimmy Carter, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X with their spouses in vintage cars, plus "The First Cookout," a large-scale reworking of "The Last Supper" hosted by Jza, Williams' name for the divine feminine, alongside 13 contemporary figures including Michelle Obama, Malala Yousafzai, Dolores Huerta, Li Tingting and Mari Copeny. The Future Lab next door is a lounge with bean bag seating, curated music and a black-lit "aether room" where visitors leave hopes for the future on sticky notes.
"Atlanta has always built the future from the rubble of what others tried to dictate," Williams said in a statement announcing the show, calling the installation a proof of concept and an invitation to stop inheriting someone else's vision. The exhibition is presented by Occasional Superstar with support from the City of Atlanta Mayor's Office of Cultural Affairs, Satellite Collective and Dashboard Co-op.
Original reporting: Rough Draft Atlanta (2026-08-12)