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The Afric-American Picture Gallery

William J. Wilson's Speculative Museum of Black Art

Cover of The Afric-American Picture Gallery has a wall of framed historical portraits atop grass against a floral wallpaper, with tables on each side. Read the Introduction

Book

Pages: 254

Illustrations: 28 illustrations, incl. 14 in color

Release Date: September 29, 2026

Author: Britt Rusert

Contributor: Leif Eckstrom

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.

Praise

“Britt Rusert’s focus on the overlooked significance of William J. Wilson’s speculative museum of Black art is a singular, significant contribution to the development of the study of Black aesthetics in the antebellum and postbellum periods. The Afric-American Picture Gallery fundamentally reshapes our understanding of the power of vision and visual culture for American democracy. Rusert’s work is a triumph.” - Sarah Lewis, author of The Unseen Truth: When Race Changed Sight in America

“In this deeply original study, Britt Rusert animates William J. Wilson’s radical innovations in 19th-century experimental fiction and visual culture, reminding us how Black literary practice houses radical epistemologies for reordering the social world. As Rusert traces Wilson’s trajectory, she crafts a compelling and devastatingly urgent account of the transformative capacities of Black art at moments when looking, creating, and living are under threat.” - Autumn Womack, author of The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880-1930

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Author/Editor Bios Table Of Contents Rights Additional Information

Author/Editor Bios

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Britt Rusert is Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review. She is the author of Fugitive Science: Empiricism and Freedom in Early African American Culture and coeditor of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America.

Table Of Contents

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Preface  vii
Introduction  1
Picture Number 1. The Slave Ship  27
1. “He Thinks He Will Submit”: The Work of Black Art in the Age of Racial Capitalism  32
2. “Our Essentially Aesthetic or Art-Nature”: Late Antebellum Black Aesthetics  68
3. “Sung Their Praise to Listening Worlds”: Two Ethiops Communing Across Time and Space  93
4. Ethiop in the Black Forest: Cruising, Fantasy, Ambivalence  120
Conclusion  146
Acknowledgments  161
Appendix. Ethiop [William J. Wilson], “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” Anglo-African Magazine, February–October 1859  165
Notes  207
Bibliography  225
Index

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Sales/Territorial Rights: World

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Additional Information

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Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-3907-5 / Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-3412-4 / eISBN: 978-1-4780-6269-1 /