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 periodical fiction by educator and activist William J. Wilson, an episodic series of experimental prose and biting satire that was published 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 and practice of Black aesthetics and politics, considering the construction of autonomous zones of Black expression and vanguardism within the context of the late Antebellum period. Connecting Wilson’s writings to later emergences of the avant-garde and counter-cultural and analyzing ekphrastic methods of vividly describing visual art, Rusert brings a little-circulated piece of writing to the fore as an inflection point in the history of Black publics and imagination.