Upon visiting the Afrofuturism room, we came across Venetian Glassware that felt out of place compared to the rest of the items on display in this because of how everything looked quintessentially associated as “Black”. Some of our first thoughts were “Wow,  I did not expect this to be here, it looks out of place.”. I think an unconscious bias rang heavily because it is been historically normalized through western history that black people don’t usually have access to such nice things especially fancy glassware in a period where only the rich owned glassware of this manner even when poor whites couldn’t afford it.

After reading the description and learning about the journey of the glassware to be in the room it described the connection of northern Africa and Europe, in this case, Italy, understanding that Africa has always been a place of abundant raw materials for people to take from, it reminds me of people going into “black spaces” and taking what they like best from it and then calling it their own. Black people were enslaved and forced to work in difficult conditions.

 

According to Britannica, Glass as an independent object has been around dates back to around 2500 BC. It originated perhaps in Mesopotamia and was brought later to Egypt. Vessels of glass appeared about 1450 BC, during the reign of Thutmose III, a pharaoh of the 18th dynasty of Egypt… Near the beginning of the Christian era, the Phoenicians learned how to blow glass with a blowing iron.

When learning about the history of glass making, I was not the least bit surprised to learn that its origins started on the Africa continent. Though

Looking at the entirety of the house itself, we can see that it is missing elements like a roof or walls, and even the parts of the house uses different materials at one part of the house and another. This felt like a metaphor to Afrofuturism in itself, the housing representing its work-in-progress  and the change from using wood to brick representing a sense of transformation of Afrofuturism, showing how the African diaspora was changing their ways to represent themselves in the world.

 

Dorian S. Joseph Y.S. Ryan Bonilla, Jashaun F.

Works Cited

Britannica. “History of Glassmaking.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 10 May 2016, https://www.britannica.com/topic/glass-properties-composition-and-industrial-production-234890/History-of-glassmaking.