Janicza Bravo on the Story Behind Her Rooms at This Year’s Met Exhibition

It’s Bravo’s sprawling constellation of references—as well as her multi-disciplinary background—that she brought to the table when devising the concept for her rooms at the Met. “I think that if you were to break down the ingredients, [directing and curating] might feel like different skill sets, but it also doesn’t feel like I’m veering away from anything. It feels like another step, I’d say,” she says. “For me, it was about boiling it down to a single frame, and thinking about it as a diorama or a tableau, even though there are no people in it.” Bravo’s instinct for weaving stories from the unlikeliest of threads—quite literally in the case of Zola, which was born from a viral Twitter story—feels palpable in the final version of her rooms. “Maybe there isn’t a beginning, middle, and end, per se, and maybe the women don’t have names, but I have a sense of the events, I have a sense of the characters, I have a sense of how they spend their days.”

When it came to her other room, the Gothic Revival Library, Bravo’s references had one unifying factor—an interest in the inner lives of women. It’s a spirit intended as something of a tribute to Elizabeth Hawes, the pioneering fashion designer and political activist whose work Bravo is celebrating. “I love Elizabeth Hawes’s writing, I love her work, and she was so pioneering, so it’s sort of heartbreaking to me that we don’t know her name,” she says. “I was also thinking about myself as a person who doesn’t have children, and what’s left after you go. Will you be remembered? I guess if you boil it down, the word I’m thinking about is legacy, even if that doesn’t feel quite juicy enough. It’s really about the idea of the memory of you only existing in the stories that others tell, and once those people die off, what is left of you?”