The African Origin of Civilization curated by Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch; Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room curated by Hannah Beachler, Michelle Commander, Ian Alteveer, and Sarah E. Lawrence

Abstract

In times of confusion and change, the human mind tends to escape the present moment, wandering in past and future tenses. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's recent exhibitions on African and African American art rendered visible what I suggest is a transitional period being undergone by both fields. The exhibition The African Origin of Civilization, which included insightful ‘guest appearances’ spread throughout the Met's galleries, demonstrated the strong ancient Egyptian artistic influences enacted by and on other African arts in the past three millennia. On the other side of the museum, Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room offered a counternarrative, opening avenues for new perspectives on both history and the future. Together, the two exhibits fostered potential recontextualizations of African and African American histories highlighting the roles of archaeology within our contemporary lives and fabulating about human futures.Nestled in the middle of the Egyptian collection, The African Origin of Civilization offered twenty-one pairings of forty-two individual ancient Egyptian and other African artworks from the Met's collection. Gathered under a chronological banner highlighting historical events on the African continent, and punctuated by descriptive paragraphs of the exhibit's project as shaped by Cheikh Anta Diop's philosophy, these pairings aimed at catalyzing temporal, geographical, and topical discussions. A redefinition and reconsideration of Egyptian art within the African art historical canon became possible through some of these pairings—not only through aesthetic similarities, but also through meaningful connections made in the wall texts.Gathered under telling subtitles such as ‘Exceptional Women’ (Figs. 1–2), ‘Masks as Doubles,’ ‘Active Enlightenment’ (Fig. 3), or ‘Lineage of Knowledge’ (Fig. 4), Alisa LaGamma and Diana Craig Patch's curatorial choices showed the range of inspirations drawn from each civilization, and the influence of Egypt on African aesthetic productions, (above, l-r) through non-hierarchical pairings. Moreover, the curatorial team did not force narratives onto visitors, but sought to allow them to create their own interpretations. This open-endedness echoed throughout the museum's galleries, where additional pairings kindled challenging dialogues. For example, a Greek kouros and a nkisi n'kondi posed questions about ‘forward momentum’ questioning artistic development, visual prosperity, healing forces and temporal decay (Fig. 5). A statue of the goddess Isis with her son Horus and a Senufo Tyekpa maternity figure from the late nineteenth century offered the opportunity to dwell on different cultures’ approaches to maternity and the divine.At times, the pairings seemed only grounded in stylistic similarities, but they nevertheless offered thought-provoking dialogues that reasserted the place of Egyptology and Egyptian arts in the study of Africa, a key part of Diop's larger historical project (Diop 1974). The merging of the Met's two collections on Egyptian and other African arts celebrated quintessential ancient Egyptian works such as the guardian figure wearing a red crown from Imhotep's tomb, the exquisite jasper fragment of a queen's face (Fig. 2), and the Middle Kingdom statue of a woman carrying food. From West Africa, the exhibition displayed works like the famous iyoba pendant mask (Fig. 1), a ci wara headdress, and a Dan ceremonial ladle. Moreover, the ‘treasure hunt’ aspect of finding African artworks juxtaposed with the Met's larger collection reminded lucky viewers of the Brooklyn Museum's African Arts—Global Conversation (curated by Kristen Windmuller-Luna in 2020), which opened up new narratives without suppressing distinct artistic traditions. Moreover, the foundation of Diop's archaeological theories helped viewers understand the significance of such a historical recontextualization. However, the absence of contemporary artists who could have contributed still more perspectives was a missed opportunity.Opening just a month before African Origins, on the other side of the museum's first floor, the concurrent exhibition Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room offered a space for time travel, speculation, and liberation focused on the African diaspora, especially in North America (Fig. 6). With a focus on African American artists challenging utopic Afrofuturist narratives, the curator Hannah Beachler, consulting curator Michelle Commander, and Met curators Ian Alteveer and Sarah E. Lawrence buttressed the growing African diasporic literature on critical fabulation catalyzed by Saidiya Hartman through a reassessment of Seneca Village, a nineteenth-century community formerly inhabiting an area in Central Park west of the Met (Hartman 2008). Inspired by the archaeological remains of Seneca Village's houses, with half a roof and peekaboo windows offering glimpses into its interior (Fig. 7), the period room challenged the quintessential idea of what a period room can be by creating a busy space completed by our imagination of what Seneca Village could have looked like today and tomorrow.The room's wallpaper, designed by the Nigerian-born artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby and entitled Thriving and Potential, Displaced (Again and Again and…), illustrated the fragmented history to which this once-thriving community has been reduced. The exhibition, located at the intersection of the Early Modern Europe, Nineteenth-Century Britain, and American Wing galleries, shared multiple temporalities. Time collapsed through the overlapping presence of an astronaut starring down the structure, centered around a chimney acting as a time travel portal and an elderly woman sitting down at the junction between the futurist living room and the kitchen linking ancestors and future generations Scattered around this scene, one found another nkisi n'kondi from Kongo, pottery sherds and glassware excavated from Seneca Village's remains, African-inspired face masks made with pairs of black heels by Willie Cole, and at the center of the show, a five-sided video display echoing a retro TV set blasting black-and-white entertainment throughout the space. The objects in the period room have never been exhibited together, challenging fictions of authenticity and temporality conveyed by the form of the encyclopedic museum itself, which is traditionally divided into galleries organized by time period and geography. The eclectic multimedia layout populated by artworks such as Roberto Lugo's ceramics and Ini Archibong's glassworks (Fig. 8), Atang Tshikare's furniture (Fig. 9), or Seneca Village's artifacts aimed at reconnecting with a blurred past while evoking the potentiality of newly empowered diasporas.The material and theoretical symbiosis of these two exhibitions displaced viewers spatially in the museum and temporally through new historical pairings that could help viewers understand African art's connections to ancient Egyptian narratives and its place within both the continent and its diasporas’ futures. A reciprocal gesture brought these two shows under the same roof to demonstrate the potentiality of anachronistic and anatopic pairings in challenging preconceived ideas of what African and African American art have been, are, and will be. The archaeological search of Seneca Village within Central Park offered clear parallels with the contested past that Egyptian art holds within the field of African art history. As Cheikh Anta Diop writes in the book that inspired the exhibition, ‘there are no fruitful speculations outside of reality’ (Diop 1974: 148). The African Origin of Civilization relied on this binary both philosophically and through the use of archaeology, in which one's present ought to be built and reshaped with one's history in mind. On the other hand, Before Yesterday We Could Fly aimed at challenging that idea by constructing a future with traces, but also unknowns. Archaeology grounds the Afrofuturist discussion in an acknowledged reality, yet a move away from it is at times both perceived and desired. Both exhibitions may have been intimidating or difficult to interpret for viewers inexperienced with current discourses in African and African American art. Two main dates were in conversation between these two shows: 1857, when Seneca Village was razed, and 1897, the year of the siege of Benin, which the British called the Benin Punitive Expedition. Additional historical contextualization and visual descriptions of these historical events would have been welcomed. Furthermore, the visual beauty of the exhibition's pairings and set arrangements overshadowed the controversial and disturbing collecting histories that many of the objects carry with and within them. Ongoing negotiations about the restitution of African artworks put into question the validity of their exhibition at museums when the importance of provenance research was and still is rising. Moreover, the display of artworks excavated from the site of Seneca Village could raise similar ethical concerns, which have a historical context much closer to home for an American audience. However, the lack of discussion on these critical topics did not dilute the successes of the exhibitions in contributing to other important discussions on the state of the fields of African and African American art. By not answering questions, the curators forced us to ask more.Both exhibitions have unknown closing dates at the time of writing, but are expected to end close to the reopening of the Rockefeller wing in 2024. Each was buttressed by strong programming activities and publications, including the Met's first graphic novella, Remixing the Future, which was published in conjunction with Before Yesterday We Could Fly‘s virtual opening as well as a virtual conference held in partnership with Wikipedia. An exhibition catalog in the form of a bulletin was also designed for The African Origin of Civilization with high-quality pictures introducing readers to the debates Diop initiated.