Looking Back to the Future: Realizing the “Afric-American Picture Gallery”

8:30 am
Registration and coffee at the Visitor Center Café

9:00 am
Welcome, Copeland Lecture Hall
Chris Strand, Charles F. Montgomery Director and CEO, Winterthur
Alexandra Deutsch, John L. and Marjorie P. McGraw Director of Collections, Winterthur

9:20 am
The Afric-American Picture Gallery and Antebellum Afro-bohemia
Britt Rusert, Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review

10:10 am
Sketch as History: History as Sketch in the Anglo-African Magazine
Derrick R. Spires, Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware

11:00 am
Coffee break, Visitor Center Café

11:30 am
Artworks Made, Unmade, and Remade: Ephemerality and Iconoclasm
Jennifer Van Horn, Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware

12:20 pm
Lunch Break – Offerings available for purchase in the Visitor Center Café

1:20 pm
Almost Unknown: Colored Conventions and the Art of Memory
Gabrielle Foreman, Professor of English, African American Studies, and History, Penn State University (no live stream)

2:10 pm
From Picture Galleries to Underground Archives in the Black Intellectual Tradition
Laura E. Helton, Associate Professor of English and History and Associate Director, Center for Material Studies, University of Delaware

3:00 pm
Sarah Shimm’s Wonderful Sofa: Stitching L’Ouverture in Silk at the Cotton Centennial
Mariah Kupfner, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage at Penn State University

3:50 pm
Unseen Images in the Gardens of Atlantic Melancholy
Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, Lecturer in Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design

5:00–6:30 pm
Reception, Winterthur Museum Galleries

8:30 am
Coffee at the Visitor Center Café

9:00 am
These Walls Can Talk: Reclaiming the Picture Gallery Through Black Imagination
Dr. Jonathan Michael Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design

9:50 am
A Look Back to the Future
Conversation between Dr. Jonathan Michael Square, Assistant Professor of Black Visual Culture at Parsons School of Design, and Reed Gochberg, Curator at the Boston Athenaeum

10:40 am
Coffee break, Visitor Center Café

11:10 am
Moving Pictures: Looking for Tom in the Picture Gallery
John Ernest, Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor and Chair of the Department of English, University of Delaware

12:00 pm
Lunch Break – Offerings available for purchase in the Visitor Center Café

1:00 pm
Through Gimlet Holes: New Visions for American Art
Stephanie Sparling Williams, Ph.D. Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum

1:50 pm
Building Communion: Black Place-Making, Sacred Kinships, and the Spirit of Delaware
Hannah Grantham, director of the Jane and Littleton Mitchell Center for African American Heritage at the Delaware Historical Society

2:50 pm
Mining the Museum . . . Again
Fred Wilson, Mixed-Media Artist
Q&A with Alexandra Deutsch, Winterthur

3:50 pm
Closing remarks

Britt Rusert, Professor of Afro-American Studies at University of Massachusetts Amherst and Executive Editor of the Massachusetts Review

This talk places William J. Wilson’s “Afric-American Picture Gallery” in a vibrant world of Afro-bohemian writing, intellectualism, and culture in late antebellum New York. Writing in dialogic, and sometimes divisive, exchange within and beyond the periodical sphere, Wilson and his cohort were conceiving of experimental Black aesthetics in a nation on the cusp of civil war. They also raised crucial questions about the role of art in an industrializing, slaveholding society.

Derrick R. Spires, Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware

This talk examines how writers for the Anglo-African Magazine drew on the sketch genre’s grounding in print, visual, and scientific cultures to map out a method for public history and civic pedagogy. The sketch was uniquely suited for articulating the contingencies of Black life on the verge of enslavement and freedom in the late 1850s. It eschewed narrative closure in favor of open-ended speculation and cultivated the sense that the future as well as the past were always in the making and open for critique and revision. Through the pages of the Anglo-African Magazine, writers like Frances E. W. Harper and William J. Wilson used the form to sketch future histories of Black liberation and artistic cultures.

Jennifer Van Horn, Professor of Art History and History at the University of Delaware

This talk takes as its starting point images by African American artists of the 18th and 19th centuries that do not survive or were never able to be made. I place these alongside artworks that enslaved African Americans repurposed, destroyed, or creatively altered. How does thinking about images’ material ephemerality, fluidity, and changeability enable us to better understand practices of subversion, of resistance, and of being otherwise that enslaved African Americans mobilized in the early United States? Made from chalk, charcoal, paint, or imagined solely in the mind, these artworks left vital traces of African American creative assertions of self and community that still resonate for contemporary audiences. 

Gabrielle Foreman, Professor of American Literature and Professor of African American Studies and History at Penn State

How is it possible for history to have sidelined seven full decades of early African American organizing? In this talk, attendees will learn about an ongoing campaign for Black rights which served as the prequel to the NAACP and Civil Rights movements. From 1830 through the beginning of the new century, free, fugitive, and freed Black Americans held multi-day “Colored Conventions” across North America. African American leaders and lay people not only came together to demand Black freedom but to advocate for all it entails, then as now: educational equity, labor justice, voting, jury, and political rights, as well as freedom from state-sanctioned violence. Wilson featured these conventions in his Afric-American Picture Gallery, but until recently, they were all but lost to the general public. Why didn’t we know?

Laura E. Helton, Assistant Professor, English and History at the University of Delaware

In his 1859 essay, William J. Wilson invited readers to imagine themselves in a transformative picture gallery—a space suffused with images made by Black artists, books penned by Black authors, and other objects depicting the richness of African diasporic history. In the decades that followed publication of the “Afric American Picture Gallery,” a cadre of Black collectors and bibliophiles created—in real life—what Wilson had envisaged. These turn-of-the-century spaces included a remarkable gallery of artifacts kept by William Henry Dorsey in his Philadelphia rowhouse, the parlor library of famed bibliophile Arturo Schomburg in Brooklyn, and the richly appointed collection of Ella and Samuel Elbert at their home in Wilmington, Delaware. At a moment when Black art and writing were missing from most mainstream cultural institutions—and when Black visitors were too often barred from entering their hometown libraries and museums—these collectors created DIY museums that preserved, displayed, and transformed Black history.

Mariah Kupfner, Assistant Professor of American Studies and Public Heritage at Penn State University

In 1884, Sarah Shimm embroidered a sofa and sent it to New Orleans. She was a public school teacher in the segregated school system in Washington, D.C., a columnist for the local Black press, and an accomplished needleworker. She sent her ornately decorated sofa to be featured in an exhibition of Black Americans’ work at the World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans; it was a luxurious object that celebrated Black women’s skill, sumptuous use of materials, and artful composition. This was a potent act in the post-Reconstruction South. 

Featured in the midst of a celebration of cotton, Shimm’s silk sofa complicated the fair’s framing of Black history. It insisted upon a long, global history of Black self-determination, not tethered to the recency of the Emancipation Proclamation. Her sofa displayed a visual history of the Haitian Revolution and lauded its most prominent leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture. Her sofa named L’Ouverture as a global figure of Black pride, nation-building, and resistance. This talk seeks to reanimate this absent sofa and traces Shimm’s methods, which reveal her embeddedness in historical and contemporary networks of Black activism, scholarship, and making. Her sofa looked to the past to articulate and shape the future.

Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, Lecturer in Literary Arts and Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design

For this generation of scholars, the chief obstacle posed by the circum-Atlantic archive is invisibility: “the problem of the unseen, the problem of nonappearance, the problem of blocked vision,” in Ian Baucom’s words. In response to an archival landscape defined more by what’s missing than what’s there, they often assume the critical demeanor of what Stephen Best calls “melancholy historicism,” namely, the “view that history consists in the taking possession of such grievous experience and archival loss.”

This talk taxonomizes the lost image and turns to the historical epistemology of melancholy to advance the debate concerning melancholy historicism. Paintings that disappeared or never existed, daguerreotypes with unknown sitters, descriptions of an image that can no longer be located—these are some of the best places to create new discourses of possibility regarding the critical styles that scholars might adopt and the affective intimacy between scholars and their objects of study. One case I will draw upon is my own work identifying the only known image of John Swanson Jacobs.

Dr. Jonathan Michael Square

This talk traces the evolution of the picture gallery from its classical origins to its reinvention in contemporary black cultural practice. Beginning with William J. Wilson’s visionary 1859 essay  “Afric-American Picture Gallery,” this presentation explores how Black artists, intellectuals, and curators have reimagined the gallery as a space not just for aesthetic contemplation but for historical intervention. From Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum to Faith Ringgold’s Dancing at the Louvre and Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s modern interventions, we consider how the gallery becomes a site of resistance, memory, and speculative possibility.

Conversation between Dr. Jonathan Michael Square and Reed Gochberg, Curator at the Boston Athenaeum

Reed Gochberg and Dr. Jonathan Michael Square are longtime friends and colleagues, having shared an office and co-taught courses at Harvard University. Reed played a pivotal role in the origins of this exhibition by introducing Jonathan to the “Afric-American Picture Gallery” during that time. In this portion of the symposium, they will reflect on their collaborative work through the lens of the text, exploring how it has shaped their scholarship, teaching, and curatorial practice. Their conversation will move fluidly between the historical significance of the essay and its broader impact on their curation and pedagogy.

John Ernest, Professor of English at the University of Delaware 

Among the various images featured in the essay “Afric-American Picture Gallery” is one identified as “A New Picture,” a picture of a boy—Thomas Onward, or “Tom for shortness.” By the time “Afric-American Picture Gallery” was published, of course, the name Tom had acquired special significance, most notably through Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe’s novel helped feature other notable Toms, some of them not originally named Tom, and became a way of thinking about both Black male piety and Black male achievement—and, over time, Black male submission to white priorities. Noting that it is important to observe that we encounter words rather than images, and that the words confound any attempt to imagine a simple understanding of Thomas Onward, Ernest will consider the presence of a few significant Black Toms in American culture and suggest ways of thinking about his, or their, presence in the “Afric-American Picture Gallery.”

Stephanie Sparling Williams, Ph.D. Andrew W. Mellon Curator of American Art at the Brooklyn Museum

In 1861, a self-liberated Black woman named Harriet Jacobs published her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. In a pivotal moment in the book, Jacobs escapes from her enslaver and seeks refuge in her grandmother’s garret, a space she refers to as her “loophole of retreat.” Determined to remain close to her children, Jacobs spends seven years hidden in this crawl space, passing the time sewing and reading the Bible. Fortunately, she discovers a gimlet, a tool she uses to pierce the walls and floorboards, allowing her to see her children. Jacobs’s deployment of a gimlet to better see the world around her serves as a powerful metaphor for the tools—and a catalyst for the conversations—that might be used to liberate museum practice from its own confinement. In the spirit of Jacobs, this talk offers its own set of gimlet holes as a way to open fresh apertures into historic American art and its display.

Hannah Grantham, Director of the Jane and Littleton Mitchell Center for African American Heritage; Rev. Dr. Stephany D. Graham Walker, Hanover Presbyterian Church; Rev. Dr. Vernon Bryant, Hockessin United Methodist Church; and Rev. Dr. Ronald W. Whitaker II, Mother African Union Church

Black faith leaders and the churches they preside over have been actively guiding American communities for generations. These spaces have served as venues where pastors delivered stirring speeches, professionalized their ministry practices of care, and advocated for citizenship and peace. Their critical voices have played a significant role throughout American history, from the years following the American Revolution to the Civil Rights Movement and into the present day. In Building Communion, Hannah Grantham, director of the Delaware Historical Society’s Mitchell Center for African American Heritage, will join leaders of historic churches in the Wilmington area to discuss the significance of Black faith spaces in Delaware and how they continue the ministerial traditions of their predecessors.

Fred Wilson, Mixed-Media Artist
Q&A with Alexandra Deutsch, John L. and Marjorie P. McGraw Director of Collections, Winterthur Museum

A pioneering artist with an interdisciplinary practice, Wilson’s groundbreaking, 1992 exhibition, “Mining the Museum” at the Maryland Historical Society (now the Maryland Center for History and Culture) interrogated the museum’s vast collections, unlocking long-ignored histories and awakening new dialogues. Today, it is a reference point in the history of museums. His seminal works and installations have been exhibited and collected by institutions throughout the world and have inspired generations of scholars, curators, and artists. 

This conversation will explore the history of Wilson’s work, his artistic practices, and his approach to intervening in museum environments and reinterpreting museum collections. Prior to arriving at Winterthur in 2019, Deutsch enjoyed a long tenure at the Maryland Center for History and Culture where the impact of Mining the Museum lingers decades after its installation. Her perspective on both that exhibition and her role in the creation of Almost Unknown will be woven into this exploration of Wilson’s globally influential art creation and Dr. Jonathan Michael Square’s innovative curation of Almost Unknown: The Afric-American Picture Gallery at Winterthur.