On November 5, The Met will unveil a long-term installation, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, that transforms a 19th-century domestic interior into a space untethered by time. Like traditional period rooms, the installation is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings and works of art to represent a fixed moment in time. However, this new space will unsettle the very idea of a period room by embracing the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected. Powered by Afrofuturism—the inspirational, creative mode that centers Black imagination and self-determination—this speculative home is activated through vision, sound, and storytelling. Before Yesterday We Could Fly is furnished with a range of works from The Met collection—from Bamileke beadwork and 19th-century American ceramics to contemporary art and design—that foreground generations of Black creativity. The period room is significantly located at a central intersection where galleries for Early Modern Europe, Nineteenth-century Britain, and the American Wing meet—a placement that alludes to the linked colonial histories embedded in the Afrofuturist Period Room.

On view at The Met Fifth Avenue in Gallery 508