IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Period Rooms in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1996), the longest-serving director of the New York museum, the now-retired Philippe de Montebello, notes the popularity of his subject. “Virtually everyone who visits the Museum’s American Wing finds there the opportunity to experience a sense of the way our forebears lived,” he writes. A period room is a museological device that combines architecture, furnishings, decorative art, and functional objects to represent an interior of a certain time, place, and style. A feature of many museums, the rooms purport to represent domestic settings in authentic and preservationist ways.
Read: Tiana Reid, “Light Years: The Met’s Futurist period room thinks inside the box”
In your own words, what is a period room? Have you ever visited a period room? Which one? When? What was the goal in installing the Afro-Futurist room within the context of the Met?
What is Afro-Futurism? Why the title of the room in the Met, “Before Yesterday We Could Fly: The Afro-Futurist Room”? Be expansive in answering this last question. Reid addresses it at several points in the article. Sign up here for one of the objects to research and share with the class. Why is this object in this installation? Include this research when you submit the answers to the assignment prompt for the Afrofuturist room. Upload your answers and the image to OpenLab. Be prepared to discuss your image while we are at the museum.
