Before Yesterday We Could Fly is the Met’s latest period room (photo © the Metropolitan Museum of Art)
A DAYLONG CELEBRATION
Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Ave. at 82nd St.
Sunday, March 13, free with museum admission, 11:00 am – 4:00 pm
212-535-7710
www.metmuseum.org
In November, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened a new period room, the spectacular Afrofuturist Before Yesterday We Could Fly, an homage to the nineteenth-century Seneca Village, a thriving African American community, including Black landowners, that was taken away by the city in order to build Central Park. Named after Virginia Hamilton’s 1985 children’s book, The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales, the installation features more than six dozen objects, including bowls, vases, cups, plates, chairs, jars, boxes, paintings, sculpture, and more by such artists as Robert Lugo, Zizipho Poswa, Atang Tshikare, Elizabeth Catlett, William Henry Johnson, Magdalene Odundo, and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The room is instilled with a spiritual energy that is intoxicating, melding past and present with the future.
“I think for a lot of us, when we were kids, our ability to envision a future that was different than some of the things that we didn’t like that we were seeing around us was to escape into a fantasy and envision a future that’s more akin to a superhero comic book than it is to actual reality — and I think that comes through in my work and a lot of the people that express visions in an Afrofuture,” Swiss industrial designer and artist Ini Archibong says in a Met video; Archibong contributed two Atlas Chairs, an Orion Table, and the Vernus 3 chandelier to the room.
“The Black imagination and manifestation of freedom is really what I was aiming at. And my feeling that roots, magic is really at the center of our strength and identity, and is something that has always helped direct us into the future and given us strength in the present,” Haitian-born, Brooklyn-based conceptual artist Fabiola Jean-Louis says in another Met video; her ornately designed Justice of Ezili corset dress, a tribute to Vodou loa (spirit) Ezili Dantor, is a highlight of the room.
Also be on the lookout for Henry Taylor’s Andrea Motley Crabtree, the first, a portrait of the first woman and Black woman army deep-sea diver; Willie Cole’s Shine, a mask made of high-heeled leather shoes equating soles and souls; Tourmaline’s photographic self-portraits Summer Azure and Morning Cloak; Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…), wallpaper that merges a Seneca Village map with images from the African diaspora; Andile Dyalvane’s Umwonyo, a pot that collapsed when he danced in his studio; Roberto Lugo’s Digable Underground, a porcelain sculpture with images of Harriet Tubman and Erykah Badu, in a place of honor on a glass plinth within an open brick tower; and Jenn Nkiru’s Out/Side of Time, a mysterious photo made specifically for the period room.
On March 13, the Met will host an all-day celebration of the installation, running from 11:00 am to 4:00 pm, consisting of art workshops in which participants can make tech-y accessories and social justice pottery; gallery chats with curators and researchers Sarah Lawrence, Ian Alteveer, and Ana Matisse Donefer-Hickie; the panel discussion “In the Parlor” with Rena Anakwe, Dyalvane, Jean-Louis, and Tourmaline; storytelling; and more. All events are free with museum admission; some require advance registration.