The Afric-American Picture Gallery: William J. Wilson's Speculative Museum of Black Art

In The Afric-American Picture Gallery, Britt Rusert examines a work of episodic fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson—a series of experimental, satirical prose published in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859. It tells the tale of a flaneur character who takes readers on a virtual tour through an imagined gallery of Black art, long before any such museum existed in the United States. Rusert uses Wilson’s series as groundwork to formulate a theory of the practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism in the context of the late antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and analyzing his methods of vivid ekphrasis, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.