The Met’s New Period Room Envisions a Thriving Afrofuturist Community [smithsonianmag.com]

Rafael Maravilla(PACEs Connection Staff) 11/16/2112:00 PM

By Livia Gershon, Photo: Anne-Marie Kellen/Metropolitan Museum of Art, Smithsonian Magazine, November 15, 2021

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s period rooms typically invite visitors to step into a recreation of a very specific time and place: a bedroom in an ancient Roman villa north of Pompeii, for example, or a grand salon in 18th-century Paris. Either removed from historic estates and rebuilt at the Manhattan museum or designed by curators to showcase artifacts in authentic settings, these intricate spaces envision an imagined past for a modern audience.

“Every period room is a complete fiction,” curator Sarah Lawrence tells Vogue’s Marley Marius. “But the invisibility of the curator’s hand—the pretense of authenticity—is what people love, right?”

For the new installation “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” the museum decided to go with a different premise.

[Please click here to read more.]

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