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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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The focus of this part of the exhibition is the enduring contributions of African American craft. Highlighted are the seminal economic, social, and cultural importance of building crafts. This section illustrates the significance of formal classroom training and apprenticeship as cultural transmission/learning styles and the aesthetic traditions of black community design in American culture.

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August 7, 2021-February 27, 2022

Come with us on a fantastic journey into the heart of Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism is a lot of things. It's the past, present, and future reimagined through a Black cultural lens. Visionary, spiritual, and generative, it is art, music, literature, and cinema that expresses a just future where Black people and Black ideas thrive. It is fantasy and science fiction that envisions the African Diaspora and Black culture as central in a technically advanced and culturally rich civilization. It is also the ordinary-now- in this very moment and the everyday pleasures that may often be seen as mundane. Afrofuturism is a strategy for Black community building.

Come with us on a fantastic journey into the heart of this movement with Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism. As we reopen our doors after months of shelter-in-place, Mothership offers a powerful reason to gather and celebrate Black imagination. Experience the work of some of the central figures of this cultural phenomena-author Octavia E. Butler, avant-garde jazz musician Sun Ra, and filmmaker Kahlil Joseph. Explore contemporary artworks, a Dora Milaje costume from the film Black Panther, photography, and other historical objects. Experience a replica of the Mothership itself- musician George Clinton of Parliament Funkadelic's Afrofuturistic vessel-to relax in an otherworldly video installation, a curated playlist by DJ Spooky, and more. Learn about the connections between important figures of Afrofuturism and the ways in which Afrofuturism is present in our everyday lives.

*Youth ages 13-17 are invited to enjoy free admission to Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism through February 27. Students can order tickets using the link below and the promo code OAK YOUTH.

Download Posters

Museum staff collaborated with the East Oakland Black Cultural Zone and youth from Inneract Project to create these four resource posters to support Black communities in Oakland. We invite you to download and print them and consider how you might invest in Black lives and Black spaces in Oakland.
Some Recent Press on Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism is supported in part by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, the Oakland Museum Women's Board, Blue Shield of California, and the Black Employee Network at Dolby Laboratories, Obsidian.

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Mothership: Voyage Into Afrofuturism - Oakland Museum of California (OMCA)

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Afrofuturism is a lot of things. It's the past, present, and future reimagined through a Black cultural lens. Visionary, spiritual, and generative, it is art, music, literature, and cinema that expresses a just future where Black people and Black ideas thrive.

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens. It represented both an escape from the crowded and dangerous confines of lower Manhattan and a site of opportunity, ownership, freedom, and prosperity. In 1857, to make way for the park, the city used eminent domain to seize Seneca Village land, displacing its residents and leaving only the barest traces of the community behind.

This project has roots in the homes of Seneca Village, of which only a fragmented history remains. Like other period rooms throughout the Museum, this installation is a fabrication of a domestic space that assembles furnishings to create an illusion of authenticity. Unlike these other spaces, this room rejects the notion of one historical period and embraces the African and African diasporic belief that the past, present, and future are interconnected and that informed speculation may uncover many possibilities. Powered by Afrofuturism-a transdisciplinary creative mode that centers Black imagination, excellence, and self-determination-this construction is only one proposition for what might have been, had Seneca Village been allowed to thrive into the present and beyond.

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. Activated through vision, sound, and storytelling, and furnished with a kaleidoscope of works from The Met's collection-from Bamileke beadwork and 19th-century American ceramics to contemporary art and design that celebrates rich and diverse traditions-the room foregrounds generations of African diasporic creativity. Before Yesterday We Could Fly also celebrates a number of new acquisitions made specifically for the project and is animated by exciting commissions from Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Fabiola Jean-Louis, and Jenn Nkiru.

In keeping with the collaborative spirit of Afrofuturism, The Met's curatorial team worked with lead curator Hannah Beachler, who envisioned and designed this space with consulting curator Michelle Commander. Since 2019, the group has engaged numerous creative and intellectual partners to infuse the installation with additional ideas and perspectives. Here, at a vital intersection at the heart of the Museum, this project opens a space for yet more histories to be told that look toward a more resilient future.

#MetAfrofuturist

The exhibition is made possible by the Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and the Director's Fund.

Additional support is provided by Art Mentor Foundation Lucerne and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

The Met's quarterly Bulletin program is supported in part by the Lila Acheson Wallace Fund for The Metropolitan Museum of Art, established by the cofounder of Reader's Digest.

This exhibition features ambient audio for the five-channel digital video installed in the Living Room and Television section.

For assistive listening, join our free WiFi network (MetMuseumFreeWiFi) and select the short URL below to connect to exhibition-specific content.

First-time users will need to select the short URL a second time after downloading the "Listen Everywhere" app.
metmuseum.org/AFPR-listen ing

Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room Bulletin

The Met's latest Bulletin features texts that honor the real, lived history of the Seneca Village residents and explores works by Black creators from the eighteenth century to the present day through the lens of Afrofuturism. The publication also includes an original graphic novella by author and illustrator John Jennings.

Read Now

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Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room - The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Seneca Village-a vibrant nineteenth-century community of predominantly Black landowners and tenants-flourished in an area just west of The Met, in what is now Central Park. By the 1850s, the village comprised some fifty homes, three churches, multiple cemeteries, a school, and many gardens.

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In 2021, The Black Woman is God virtual exhibition will assert that celebrating Black women is essential to building a more just society and a sustainable future. The project will explore the intersectionality of race, age, and gender and will dismantle stereotypes of Black women. TBWG will reach out across global communities to reclaim physical space historically denied Black women artists. In doing so, generations will reclaim the legacy of Black women artists.

TBWIG exhibitions reconfigure communal trauma, employing African, Diaspora traditions and practices, connecting dance forms rooted in cultural, historical and cosmological recognition in public spaces with recognizable African motifs embedded in the form. The program will provide a bridge to the meaning of the expressions, exploring the deep cultural connections of the artists to their work. The mission is to assert that we are moving beyond embattled ideologies and communities toward African spiritual growth.

The community connections will address the varying artistic mediums of visual and performing arts, workshops, and artist talks all designed to re-remember that Black people are the first human beings that have contribute to global society- beyond African culture.

The 2020 Black Woman is God exhibition will explore the intersectionality of race, age, and gender and will examine Black women's contributions as artists, healers, and social change-makers. The exhibition will feature over 80 new works by Black women employing painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, film/video, mixed, new media, and performance, showing that when Black women create, they are God.

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In 2021, The Black Woman is God virtual exhibition will assert that celebrating Black women is essential to building a more just society and a sustainable future. The project will explore the intersectionality of race, age, and gender and will dismantle stereotypes of Black women.

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Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation

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Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip Hop Generation

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The post-graffiti moment in 1980s New York City marked the transition of street art from city walls and subway trains onto canvas and into the art world. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions. This exhibition features his works in painting, sculpture, drawing, video, music, and fashion, alongside works by his contemporaries-and sometimes collaborators-A-One, ERO, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura, Keith Haring, Kool Koor, LA2, Lady Pink, Lee Quiñones, Rammellzee, and Toxic. Throughout the 1980s, these artists fueled new directions in fine art, design, and music, driving the now-global popularity of hip-hop culture.

"Writing the Future: Basquiat and the Hip-Hop Generation" illuminates how this group's subversive abstractions of both visual and verbal language-including neo-expressionism, freestyle sampling, and wildstyle lettering-rocketed their creative voices onto the main stages of international art and music. It is the first major exhibition to contextualize Basquiat's work in relation to hip-hop and marks the first time his extensive, robust, and reflective portraiture of his Black and Latinx friends and fellow artists has been given prominence in scholarship on his oeuvre. Notable among those works is the much-revered painting Hollywood Africans, which lionizes Toxic and Rammellzee, the legendary artist/philosopher who is also represented with multiple works in "Writing the Future," and with whom Basquiat created the prophetic, influential, and talismanic rap song "Beat Bop."

Learn more about Basquiat, his peers, and New York's post-graffiti era.

The exhibition is accompanied by an illustrated catalogue produced by MFA Publications and edited by co-curators Liz Munsell, the MFA's Lorraine and Alan Bressler Curator of Contemporary Art, and Greg Tate, writer, musician, and author of Flyboy in the Buttermilk and Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader.

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The post-graffiti moment in 1980s New York City marked the transition of street art from city walls and subway trains onto canvas and into the art world. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) became the galvanizing, iconic frontrunner of this transformational and insurgent movement in contemporary American art, which resulted in an unprecedented fusion of creative energies that defied longstanding racial divisions.

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Studio Museum in Harlem is the nexus for artists of African descent locally, nationally, and internationally and for work that has been inspired and influenced by Black culture. It is a site for the dynamic exchange of ideas about art and society.

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In the Black Fantastic | curator tour with Ekow Eshun | Hayward Gallery