From Wilson's Cave Gallery to Jemisin's The Stone Sky

Lastly, in “From Wilson’s Cave Gallery to Jemisin’s The Stone Sky,” Britt Rusert examines how William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery represents but also registers ambivalence about black counterpublics... [ view full abstract ]

Lastly, in “From Wilson’s Cave Gallery to Jemisin’s The Stone Sky,” Britt Rusert examines how William J. Wilson’s Afric-American Picture Gallery represents but also registers ambivalence about black counterpublics and their relationship to black radical organizing and visual art in the late antebellum period. Serialized in seven installments in the Anglo-African Magazine in 1859, Wilson’s Picture Gallery imagines the first museum of black art in the United States, long before any such institution actually existed in the country. This paper examines the hesitation around the “underground” expressed throughout Wilson’s series, figured through a black art museum in New York City that is mirrored and shadowed by a secluded cave gallery occupied by a black artist working in exile from the United States. Finally, Rusert moves from late antebellum cave galleries to N.K. Jemisin’s acclaimed Broken Earth Trilogy to explore the question: if, as Christina Sharpe has argued, “slavery was the weather” and anti-blackness is atmospheric, then how do we understand the racialization of the ground itself, as well as the underground, in the long nineteenth century?