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

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

Hardcover

Art History19th Century United States HistoryBlack American Studies

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ISBN10: 1478034122
ISBN13: 9781478034124
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Sep 29 2026
Pages: 254
Weight: 1.15
Height: 0.80 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
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.

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Black American Studies