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.
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.