Britt Rusert

William J. Wilson's 1859 periodical fiction, the Afric-American Picture Gallery, is a stunning and singular text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. This project is an intensive study of Wilson's Picture Gallery, a deeply visual and experimental text that reproduces no actual images but relies instead on the powers of ekphrastic description. It has two major aims: to situate the Picture Gallery within key political and aesthetic debates of the 1850s as well as cultures of black cosmopolitanism and queer bohemianism in late antebellum New York; and to chronicle how the Picture Gallery anticipates later genealogies of African American art and contributes to current conversations about the politics of black museums and art institutions in society.

William J. Wilson's 1859 periodical fiction, the Afric-American Picture Gallery, is a stunning and singular text that imagines the first museum of black art in the United States. This project is an intensive study of Wilson's Picture Gallery, a deeply visual and experimental text that reproduces no actual images but relies instead on the powers of ekphrastic description. It has two major aims: to situate the Picture Gallery within key political and aesthetic debates of the 1850s as well as cultures of black cosmopolitanism and queer bohemianism in late antebellum New York; and to chronicle how the Picture Gallery anticipates later genealogies of African American art and contributes to current conversations about the politics of black museums and art institutions in society.