The Metropolitan Museum of Art has completed one of its most thoughtful reparations efforts in more than a year since the racial reckoning.
I do not mean its returning of some priceless artifacts back to West Africa, or its addressing of past racial wrongs with a restitution fund to support diversity in the arts, or the acknowledgment by Dan Weiss, its president and chief executive, on the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s police killing, that “the Met is a brilliant institution that has fallen short on these issues of race, equity and justice.”
I am referring more to speculative and symbolic. Its newest installation, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” boldly grapples with one of New York City’s biggest racial traumas: the 1857 destruction of Seneca Village, a vibrant, predominantly free Black community whose members had owned land along West 82nd to West 89th Streets starting in 1825, but were forced out in order to make Central Park. In 1856, racists vilified the community by calling its housing structures “shanties” while describing its poor living conditions as unhygienic. These stereotypes were used by the city to justify its need for eminent domain to buy the land.
This exhibition is rooted in the present and reflects the past. The Met, breaking with its own tradition of the immersive “period room” shaped by a particular period of time or genre of decorative arts, has envisioned a counterfactual fable: The room here belongs to a Seneca Village resident, a Black woman and her family, left undisturbed, and able to maintain the dignity, safety and suffrage that were the results of their landowning. Most strikingly, the room’s ornateness underscores the toll of the city’s loss, and the consequences of denying Black people the ability to pass on their wealth across generations.
The installation consists of a breathtaking re-creation of one of its resident’s homes as it might have existed in her own day, our time, and in some distant future. The farsighted curatorial team led by Hannah Beachler, the first African American to win an Oscar for production design for “Black Panther,” collaborating with the Met curators Ian Alteveer and Sarah Lawrence, and Michelle Commander, the consulting director and literary scholar, not only give Seneca Village a far more empowering ending than the one it met, but enable us to have a glimpse of what could be.
The name of the exhibition comes from the 19th century legend of the Flying Africans. This legend is passed down through oral histories and tells of a group West Africans that flew back from Georgia to escape slavery in the New World. The myth inspired Virginia Hamilton’s classic children’s book, “The People Could Fly” in 1985, and other artists. This installation is more towards the fantastic, with a few hints at flight.
Consisting of a house, whose clapboard style recalls the exterior of a 19th-century Seneca Village home, while its open floor plan connecting the living room and the kitchen evokes our free-flow interior designs of today, the room also features wallpaper by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby — “Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…).” This inkjet vinyl print, one of three commissioned works for the installation, is a collage that includes a survey map of Seneca Village, images of artifacts discovered during an archaeological dig at the site in 2011, vintage photographs, called ambrotypes, of 19th-century Black New Yorkers, and repeating silhouettes of okra. The plant’s presence, in all its various shades of green, marks time as a reminder of the Old World that was brought to Americas by enslaved Africans during Middle Passage. It also suggests the dense foliage that surrounds Central Park today and protected those Black villagers.
Afrofuturism, invoked in its subtitle, is a fantastic, otherworldly, or science-fiction-based aesthetic that imagines a better, freer world for Black people. Such temporal and spatial collapses are at the heart of this entire experience, an act that might impart some small form of memory justice to those modern-day descendants of Seneca Village who remain unknown to us today and whose ancestors’ stories were largely forgotten until Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar’s 1992 social history, “The Park and the People: A History of Central Park.”
These artistic gestures, although well-meaning, are only partially fulfilling to me. They also serve as reminders that art can only go so weit in redressing American racism’s tragedy.
The Met’s real atonement is with its reliance on the traditional period room, a genre that is increasingly scrutinized by critics for its whitewashing of history.
“Every period room is a fiction, right,” Sarah Lawrence, the Met’s curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, told me during my visit. “It has a veneer of authenticity.” As she acknowledged, “Every single period room is bringing together floors, ceilings, objects that never were actually together at the same time. So, if we acknowledge the fiction, how can we use that as an opportunity to bring stories in our museum that otherwise are left out of our period rooms?” Later, she added, “We have an amazing range of period rooms, but for the most part, they are white affluent Eurocentric interiors.”
In 2017, the Met began actively experimenting with its own period rooms by reconstructing the finely detailed, all white closet of Sarah Berman — an early 20th-century immigrant who traveled from Belarus to Palestine — and placing it next to the recently installed Worsham-Rockefeller Dressing Room from 1882. The result was a dialogue about modern life’s simplicity and excess.
But “Before Yesterday We Could Fly” is far more transformational, because it gives the museum a real chance to rethink the entire premise upon which the period room was based — verisimilitude to the past — and embrace how the racial contradictions of New York City’s history and the utopian aspirations of Seneca Village continue to shape our country today.
Nothing achieves this crisscrossing of time better than Jenn Nkiru’s five-sided television that sits in the middle of the living room. Running a short black and white film featuring archival footage, re-enactments of a 19th-century African American Seneca Village family dining together, and an elder Black, or griot figure calling out “Seneca/Senegal,” the television is both analog and avant-garde — African Diasporic yet thoroughly domestic, and disruptive to the very ideas of periodization, or for that matter, nationhood.
The more I stayed there, the more fascinated I became with the vast array of domestic products. To name just a few: a rubber hair comb patented by Charles Goodyear in the 1850s; Willie Cole’s 2007 “Shine” artwork, an assemblage of black high heel shoes sculpted in the tradition of a West African mask; Cyrus Kabiru’s 2020 sculpture “Miyale Ya Blue,” a recycled boombox decked in red, yellow, turquoise with its nine antennas hinting at the intergalactic while also curved in the shape of a crown; Elizabeth Catlett’s 1947 linocut of Sojourner Truth; or a 17th-century crucifix from the Kongo region. The collection was not dizzying. It was more deliberate. These temporal juxtapositions were ultimately a form of continuity throughout the room.
Whether such an exceptional approach to the period room is an outlier or will radically alter the fate of the museum‘s overall approach to similar installations remains to be seen.
The grace and grandeur threading together these disparate times, items, mediums are most fully on display in a new commission by the Met, the Haitian artist Jean-Louis Fabiola’s “Justice of Ezili,” a sculptural dress made of paper sheets and clay, 24-karat gold, Swarovski crystals and resin. It belonged to the fictional Black woman we are visiting and makes the break between what was and the reality of its inhabitants even more striking.
In this sense, it is good that “Before Yesterday, We Could Fly” is self-aware enough to know it cannot remedy such a trauma. It is actually a generative addition of those ongoing conversations about race justice, healing, and repair that cultural institutions such as the Met and everyday people across the country were asked to have during the heights of Black Lives Matter 2020.
The room is ideal because it is so immersive and suggestive that viewers find themselves going just a few moments away to see the sites in Central Park where Seneca Village used to stand. They find the clash of historical erasure and artistic speculation as well as forced displacement and Black Freedom hopes to be so jarring and unjust that we all grieve, and then begin the hard work to repair our economic and emotional health.
Before Yesterday We Could Fly: Afrofuturist Periodroom
This is an ongoing show. Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue; (212) 535-7710, metmuseum.org. Timed tickets are required to gain entry to the museum. All visitors over 12 years old must be vaccinated for Covid-19.
Source: NY Times
