Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s work begins with a layer of photographic transfers. Her design for this gallery’s verdant backdrop combines images of the 1856 hand-drawn survey map of Seneca Village and nineteenth-century ambrotype portraits of Black New Yorkers, which are then juxtaposed with more contemporary images from the African diaspora. Overlaying this imagery is the lush foliage of an okra plant, a crop with nourishing power and potent symbolism. Originating in sub-Saharan West Africa and carried across the sea during the Middle Passage, okra embodies not only that brutal displacement but also the multitude of culinary and cultural traditions that have endured and thrived on American shores.

Descendants of the gardeners, herbalists, and experimentalists of Seneca Village, the imagined residents of this home used their knowledge of technology, science, and magic to develop a means of time travel, which has allowed them to gather works of art from across time and space. This kitchen is the locus of these activities, centered around a large brick hearth that operates as the portal through which these objects enter the home.

Inside the fireplace is Roberto Lugo’s Digable Underground. Lugo is renowned for his vibrant reinterpretations of eighteenth- century European porcelain forms, which he reimagines through the lens of contemporary hip-hop culture and embellishes with graffiti and kente prestige cloth patterns. His works center the portraits of heroes whose visages do not often adorn fine porcelain or whose stories are too often absent from such luxurious wares. Here, nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Tubman faces the kitchen and contemporary singer-songwriter Erykah Badu looks into the living room; together, they reflect the ways that the kitchen acts as a site of temporal confluence—a merging of past and present into future possibilities.

If the imagined residents of this house acquired works of art from across space and time, what might they choose? The group of objects assembled here—selected as physical markers of the Black imagination—is only one of countless possible answers to this question. Just as a monumental hearth is at the center of the kitchen’s activities, a five-sided television marks this more futuristic space as a source of information, inspiration, and connection to the multiple pasts, presents, and futures from which these objects might have been collected.

This kaleidoscopic device is an homage to the console televisions of the mid-twentieth century, which beamed so many monumental events into the home and served as a locus of storytelling and family life. It broadcasts a new work made especially for the room by Jenn Nkiru, a British-born filmmaker of Nigerian descent. Her videos celebrate the vibrant creativity and speculative vision of the African diaspora while exploring what she calls “cosmic archaeology,” a potentially mystical connection to history through visual memory.