There is a kitchen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that belongs to a family who never had the chance to live there. A brick hearth recalls a nineteenth-century domestic space. Nearby, a futuristic living room is organized around a five-sided television. The two spaces exist at once. Their imagined occupants are descendants of Seneca Village, the predominantly Black New York community destroyed when the city cleared land for Central Park in 1857. The room does not pretend to recover a lost home intact. It asks what a home might have become if the people who built a neighborhood had been allowed to stay.
Hannah Beachler was lead curator and designer of Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, which opened at the Met in 2021. Her work in film had already made her a defining production designer of speculative space, particularly through Wakanda in Black Panther. At the museum, the task changed. Instead of building an environment for a camera and actors, she helped construct a room in which visitors could think about an absent family, an actual eviction and a future that history prevented. The title's impossible sequence of time is the design proposition: to imagine forward, the institution first has to reckon with what it removed from view.
An ordinary period room often suggests that the objects assembled within it once coexisted exactly as displayed. The Met's own publication on the exhibition, co-written in part by Beachler, explains the fiction behind that apparent completeness. Curators select, arrange and narrate. In this room the invention is declared rather than hidden. The result has a different kind of honesty. No document can tell us precisely how a particular Seneca Village family would have lived through the decades after 1857. Beachler and her colleagues instead make the uncertainty the ground of the work.
A destroyed neighborhood, an imagined house
Seneca Village existed near the site of today's Central Park from the 1820s until the city's seizure of the land. The Met publication describes a thriving, predominantly Black community, whose residents were displaced by eminent domain. Archaeological work has recovered ceramics and other traces of domestic life. Those fragments matter, but they cannot reconstruct the future that eviction foreclosed. A shard can speak to a meal or a household practice; it cannot show the grandchildren who might have grown up there.
Beachler's design begins in that gap. The room's nineteenth-century kitchen connects with a modernist frame and a futurist living space. The Met's account describes the hearth and television as centers of family gathering and storytelling. They are separated by technological eras yet placed in one open plan. The arrangement prevents the visitor from walking through a simple chronology in which older objects become obsolete as new ones arrive. The family's imagined life could hold inherited practices, contemporary pleasures and inventions still to come.
The hearth is more than an antique signifier. In a domestic room, it suggests warmth, preparation and conversation, acts that make a place usable rather than merely picturesque. The five-sided television likewise does more than announce a futuristic date. The visiting guide connects it to the console televisions around which twentieth-century families gathered for news and stories. Its unusual geometry refuses to let the screen be mistaken for a familiar appliance, but the social function remains recognizable. Beachler gives each technology a history of use.
This is a striking answer to a common problem in futurist design. Sleekness can make an imagined world look uninhabited, as if people have no possessions, habits or inherited attachments. Beachler's Met room is dense with relationships among things. Its occupants could have collected, kept and rearranged them. It is a proposition about Black continuity as much as Black invention. A family is allowed a long time in which to acquire objects, change tastes and hand down stories.
The room is also an intervention into the museum's own period-room tradition. In their introduction to the exhibition publication, Beachler, Ian Alteveer and Sarah Lawrence note how heavily such displays have represented affluent white and European interiors. A domestic setting can grant its imagined residents historical importance by inviting visitors to enter their private world. Here the institution extends that imaginative invitation to a family displaced from land only a short distance away. The proximity is uncomfortable and necessary. The fictional room is set beside a real urban absence.
The architect of a possible Wakanda
Beachler's work on Black Panther approached another counterfactual premise. Wakanda is a fictional African nation that developed without colonization. In a first-person interview with LAist, she described asking what such a place would look like after thousands of years of its own history. The question is architectural before it is decorative. A convincing city cannot be produced by placing a traditional motif on a futuristic surface. It needs a sense of how people built, altered and inhabited a place over time.
In another interview about Wakanda, Beachler described the months she spent building a design bible for the film. She said it covered 187 sets and reached 515 pages. The numbers are impressive, but their value lies in the kind of discipline they indicate. A brief appearance on screen still needed an underlying reason. Architecture, objects and routes through a city had to form a world actors could occupy, even if viewers saw only part of it.
Beachler has described production design as a way to tell a story through environments. In a Backstage interview, she explained that the designer develops histories for sets and makes choices that support performers. This is often invisible labor. When a character reaches for something, moves through a doorway or pauses in a room, the space has to make the action credible. The best speculative environment is therefore more than a persuasive image. It changes what a character can do.
Wakanda's design involved many makers. The Academy's record of the 2019 award credits Beachler for production design and Jay Hart for set decoration. Ruth E. Carter developed the costumes. These roles met in the film but were not interchangeable. Beachler's imagined built world gave a setting for bodies dressed, lit and filmed through other collaborators' craft. Recognizing her achievement does not require assigning every visual decision in the film to her alone.
The distinction also matters at the Met. The Afrofuturist room was an extensive collaboration with curators, artists, researchers and museum staff. Beachler was its lead curator and designer, as the Met publication states. That lead role gave form to a collective proposition. It did not turn the work of the other contributors into anonymous material.
A room furnished from several times
The Met installation gathers objects that could not all belong to one historical moment. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century ceramics share the domestic space with contemporary works by artists of the African diaspora. The combination is deliberate. It imagines residents who inherit material traces, make choices in the present and reach toward things that have not yet been invented. An object does not have to prove that a particular Seneca Village family owned it to contribute to the room's speculative life.
The visiting guide identifies works by Cyrus Kabiru and Roberto Lugo, among others. The Met's publication also describes a room clad in imagery by Njideka Akunyili Crosby. These artists' contributions bring distinct practices into a shared space. Beachler's design had to accommodate difference rather than make the objects appear to come from one hand. A believable home may contain things acquired for reasons that have nothing to do with a curator's desire for visual harmony.
The television carries work by filmmaker Jenn Nkiru. According to the Met's guide, Nkiru's video explores connections to African diasporic history through visual memory. A screen inside a room can easily become a spectacle that dominates all other objects. Here its placement as a family gathering point gives the moving image a social setting. The question is not just what a visitor sees on the screen, but how a family might have lived with images arriving from elsewhere.
The plan joins this visual abundance to a clear structural idea. The wooden kitchen, modernist frame and futurist living room are legible as different temporal languages. They are not separated by walls that force the visitor to choose one era at a time. In that adjacency, the room can hold inheritance and change together. The design treats historical continuity as something built through repeated acts of use, not as an object placed under glass.
This method differs from the production design of a film while drawing on a similar skill. Wakanda had to sustain a story as the camera moved through it. The Met room has to sustain multiple possible stories as visitors look from one object to another. Its residents are imagined, and no actor will enter to resolve every question about them. Beachler lets the environment carry enough detail to suggest lives without pretending to know those lives completely.
What absence can ask of design
An erased community presents a difficult commission. It is possible to make displacement visually moving while leaving its causes vague. Before Yesterday We Could Fly names the municipal act that ended Seneca Village. The room's speculative future begins with the fact that the city took the land. That anchor keeps imagination from becoming a way of avoiding history. There is no innocent “what if” here. There is a decision made by people with power and a question about the futures it prevented.
At the same time, a room devoted only to loss would allow the act of eviction to define the residents more completely than their own practices did. Beachler's design gives an alternative emphasis. The occupants could be collectors, viewers, cooks, makers and custodians of knowledge. They could choose what to preserve and what to change. Their domestic future is not described solely through the wound that stopped it.
The Met publication notes that traditional period rooms can depend on the invisibility of curatorial invention. Beachler's Afrofuturist room makes invention visible as a form of responsibility. It does not call its objects a recovered Seneca Village interior. It asks visitors to imagine a continuation while keeping the historical rupture in view. That difference allows the installation to be emotionally forceful without claiming a false documentary completeness.
It also places a question back on the museum. Which homes has it considered exemplary? Whose stories have been excluded from its architecture of history? A new room cannot repair the demolition of a neighborhood, and the institution's display cannot replace community control over urban land. But the room can change the scale at which viewers are invited to think about a Black family's interior life. It can make absence visible as the consequence of a public act rather than as a natural blank in the archive.
Beachler's work has often been described through spectacle, especially after the success of Black Panther. The detail that unites the film and the Met room is subtler: both ask how a world could have developed if its inhabitants' choices had been allowed to structure the place around them. Wakanda imagines an African nation with an independent history of technological and architectural change. The Seneca Village room imagines a local family extending a life that was forcibly interrupted. The settings differ sharply, but each design requires duration. A future has to have a past and everyday use.
The Academy recognized Beachler as the first Black production designer to win its award in that category. That milestone belongs in her career, though it is not the reason the rooms and cities she makes are compelling. Their force comes from the care with which she asks what a place remembers. In Wakanda, that question helps a fictional nation feel lived in. At the Met, it helps an imagined house make a real history of removal harder to ignore.
Krull's conversation with Julie Dash offers a related problem in another medium. Dash describes a historical film whose characters face a future they cannot know. Beachler's period room gives that uncertainty an architectural form. A hearth and a five-sided television can share one house because a family should have been able to keep living, adapting and telling stories across the time between them.
The most radical object in Beachler's Met design may be the open plan itself. It refuses to seal the nineteenth century away from whatever comes next. The room is furnished, but its future is unfinished. Its imagined residents can move through it with a history that was theirs to make. That possibility cannot undo the city's demolition of Seneca Village. It can, however, show exactly why the loss was larger than the buildings destroyed: a community was deprived of time.