Time Out says: The Metropolitan Museum of Art is literally making room for the real, lived history of Seneca Village, the once-thriving community founded by free Black New Yorkers that existed just a few hundred yards west of The Met between the 1820s and 1850s.
Museum period rooms often fail to look beyond the purview of the rich, white people of yesteryear, making them seem staid and unadventurous. A new period room at the Metropolitan Museum of Art created through the lens of Afrofuturism, however, is seeking to redefine what the medium can accomplish. Called “Before Yesterday We Could Fly,” the Afrofuturist period room peeks inside the 19th-century house of a matriarch from Seneca Village, a middle-class Black neighborhood razed by New York City to create Central Park.