In honor of Black History Month, HD celebrates some of the many Black creators leaving their mark on the hospitality industry and beyond. These 25 individuals—who have been featured in our magazine, website, and spoken at our in-person events—span multiple creative realms, including design, architecture, art, entrepreneurship, and more.
Guests were invited to discover the work of 17 international artists—among them Pierre Yovanovitch, Atang Tshikare, and Dimore Studio—who reinterpreted the Medallion Chair for the modern era.
The House of Dior’s Medallion Chair Exhibition has landed in the US at the new arts center during Design Miami and Art Basel Miami Beach at Superblue last night. Earlier this year the exhibition opened at the Salone del Mobile in Milan, where seventeen artists were invited to reinterpret the iconic medallion chair with their own chair. All Medallion chairs are on display from today until December 5th at Superblue.
“Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room,” like any of The Met’s period rooms, is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings and objects to create a fiction of authenticity. Rather than affirm a fixed moment in time, however, this structure reimagines the immersive experience of the period room by embracing the African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected.
On Friday the museum will open its first foray into interiors of the African diaspora with the installation Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room. Located significantly at the crossroads between the American wing and the 19th-century Britain and pre-19th-century Europe galleries, the period room considers a number of the varying influences on American and African American culture, creating a bridge between the past and the future.
ay a visit to the “period rooms” at most museums, and you’ll find assemblages of furniture, decor, and objects from a particular time period, all arranged to suggest you’ve stepped into a time capsule from a specific year in the past.
The title, Before Yesterday We Could Fly, is inspired by Virginia Hamilton’s legendary retellings of the Flying African tale, which celebrates enslaved peoples’ imagination, creative uses of flight, and the significance of spirituality and mysticism to Black communities in the midst of great uncertainty.
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.
After years of being perceived by the rest of the Western world as a curiosity (alternatively a creative treasure trove to be plundered), African designers and Artists are finally being recognized for their talent. Recently Christian Dior came calling to South African Artist Atang Tshikare to apply his genius to their ‘Medallion Chair’. The Wire spoke to Atang about his latest collab.