The Black Museum of Words: Ekphrasis and Curation in William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery”

Abstract: This article explores the formal and generic innovations of William J. Wilson’s serialized short story, “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” which was published in the Anglo-African Magazine in seven installments between February 1859 and October 1859. Beginning with a creative critical pastiche of Wilson’s style, I locate Wilson within a tradition of Black ekphrastic writers like Melvin Tolson and Margaret Danner who contribute to a space I name the “Black Museum of Words,” one that shares the revisionist logic of work by contemporary Black installation artists like Glenn Ligon and Kara Walker. Contributing to the recent recovery of Wilson’s work by Ivy G. Wilson, Derrick Spires, Carla Peterson, Teresa Goddu, Britt Rusert, and others, I parse the unexamined distinction between the aims of Ethiop and the gallery’s unnamed curator, their instrumentalization of the gallery as a medium for producing an image of an “Afric-American” nation that resembles but is not isomorphic with the United States. The spatially and temporally dislocated nation that becomes visible through the generative interference of their perspectives is one that is actively contested and that aspires not the illusory seamlessness of the panorama, but to the dynamic juxtapositions of the picture gallery and its discontinuous frames.