Seeing "The Death of Mann"

Abstract

This essay celebrates John Wilson's visual masterpiece, The Richard Wright Suite (2001), a series of six elegant etchings that reimagine Richard Wright's novella, "Down by the Riverside." Wilson's images, and the story that inspired them, remember lives lost to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Just as Wright's novella has been associated with accounts of the flood lyricized in blues music, Wilson's etchings visualize the blues by depicting the Mississippi River as a striking blue stream. Laboriously crafted in aquatint, the river not only memorializes the power of climate disasters fomented by industrial capitalism, but honors those Black lives claimed in their devastation.