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,...