Period rooms can often seem staid. They’re usually showplaces for furniture from a particular era--say, Louis XVI or Rococo Revival.
But before the pandemic, several curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art had a different idea. They wanted to reach new, diverse audiences. They also knew that all period rooms are a kind of fiction, researched and assembled by curators who wanted to tell a story of what it was like to live in the past. What if they looked to speculative fiction for a period, instead of to history, they wondered. What if they created an Afrofuturist room?
Afrofuturism means different things to different people, but generally, its main tenet is that the African diaspora’s past, present and future are all connected, and it mixes that concept with technology, science, mysticism and Black imagination and excellence. It wonders: What would Black culture and identity look like if the defining moment wasn’t the Middle Passage? It imagines that things were different, are different, and will be different for Black people. Think actress Janelle Monáe, musician Sun Ra and science fiction author Octavia Butler.
So Met curators Sarah Lawrence and Ian Alteveer reached out to Hannah Beachler, the Oscar-winning set designer for Black Panther--itself an example of Afrofuturism--who became the lead curator. They also contacted Dr. Michelle Commander, a specialist in Seneca Village and Transatlantic slavery with the New York Public Library, who is the consulting curator. Together, the four imagined a woman who lived (and still lives) in her home in Seneca Village, a historic Black community just west of the Met which was destroyed through eminent domain to help create Central Park.
In the exhibit’s backstory, the woman has gained resources--and a time machine--and her home is now a collection of objects created by Black people across the centuries, including the future.
That home is the Afrofuturism period room. And it is a finely-detailed marvel.
Previously, most period rooms at the Met have featured “predominantly white, Eurocentric cultures,” said Lawrence. But, she said, the Afrofuturism room is an example of what can happen with new kinds of collaborations, and a new vision for what the museum could be.
When people come to the exhibit entitled “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” which opened to the public on Friday, they’ll see “the joy that comes from that space,” Beachler said. “We often talk about tragedy and I think what I want people to see is pride and joy when they walk into the space firs, and then explore deeper.”
She said that “every single inch” of the space has a reason and a story behind it, from the iron nails in the wood siding (representing both the shackles of African bondage and the freedom from those shackles) to Haitian artist Fabiola Jean-Louis’ adaptation of a 19th century corset dress, its bright gold details and bold colors pushing back against historic restrictions on gender and race.
The exhibit is really a room inside a room. Visitors walk into a wallpapered space and can circle around the home, peeking in through glass walls and cut-out windows. There are two connected sections: a more rustic area, representing the original Seneca Village house, with objects like a recovered small hair comb from the site; and a more futuristic room, with a five-sided television nodding to mid-century console TVs and showing a new work by filmmaker Jenn Nkiru. Within the period room are images of Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr, but also Beyoncé and Stacey Abrams. There is Venetian glass, an ornate gourd meant to hold palm wine as a way to welcome visitors to the chiefdoms of Cameroon, and a retrofitted transistor radio that contemporary Kenyan artist Cyrun Kabiru says transports people through space and time.
For the rooms to showcase a mix of objects from the Met’s collection plus new acquisitions and commissions is very important, said Max Hollein, the Met’s director.
“It’s a way of demonstrating our commitment to engaging with and supporting artists of our time,” Hollein said.
He said that pushing the boundaries of what a period room could be was “unprecedented” for the museum. “This is an opportunity to have new and necessary conversations and to illuminate stories that have yet to be told within our walls.”
Met curator Lawrence said that after the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, the team invited everyone in the Met’s building to a conversation about the project and to get feedback - there were so many people who wanted to attend, they couldn’t fit them all in the Zoom meeting. “It sparked an ongoing conversation that is continued really up to the present moment,” she said.
But for the public, the process is likely less important than the room itself, a sparkling wonder, with surprising objects everywhere one looks. Take, for example, the massive 2018 portrait of Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first Black woman to be a deep-sea diver in the U.S. Army. She wears a diving suit and holds a giant helmet, sitting regally, looking out over the period room as if surveying her realm. This is my domain, she seems to be saying.
“The room is bringing the future and the past to a community that has kind of lost those things,” Beachler said. “It’s finding a place to thrive, to be vulnerable, to be active. I wanted to put all that in - and I wanted to honor those in Seneca Village and in all the communities across the United States that didn’t get a chance to have a place before.”
Learn more about the Afrofuturist Period Room, and ongoing exhibit at the Met, here.
