The goal for the Afrofuturist Period Room: Meet The Artists series was to promote the many contemporary artists whose work is featured in Before Yesterday We Could Fly: An Afrofuturist Period Room, providing a video in which they could contextualize the inspiration for their art in their own words.
We asked the twelve contemporary artists whose work is featured in the Afrofuturist Period Room to film themselves informally on mobile phones, answering a set of questions about their experience with the project, their artistic process, and the inspiration for their work. We coordinated with the artists to inform on proper mobile filming techniques, organized the receipt of all video and photography assets, then edited the videos, keeping the informal and intimate presentation, but giving them a more uniform structure and consistent branding through graphics and music. Videos were published to The Met's social channels, an audience of 4+ million, throughout the year.
The Afrofuturist Period Room: Meet The Artists series now has a presence both online to our audiences of millions, and within the room through an interactive QR code for visitors who are interested in learning more. The video series' total views have currently reached over 750k, with countless comments thanking us for sharing the behind-the-scenes of these artists' process. It remains a continual resource both for those looking to learn more about afrofuturism, such as during our Afrofuturist Creative Convening, and for those who want to learn more about the individual artists' practice. The series has been a great learning experience to us in showing how much our audiences appreciate and value having a living artist who can invite us to take a look into their artmaking process, and see how some objects at The Met get made.
