Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room

At The Met, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room” stages a domestic interior that treats Black life in New York as a site of memory, speculation, and inherited craft. The room folds references to Seneca Village and the city’s layered histories into an installation that reads like both archive and imagined future. As one of the museum’s most explicit engagements with Afrofuturism, it reframes the period room as a living narrative rather than a sealed past. The result is quiet, pointed, and attentive to what museums usually leave out.