Ronald Jackson turns An American Fiction into portraits cast for an imagined screenplay

American Fiction, Cord Jefferson's Oscar-winning film adapted from Percival Everett's Erasure, follows Monk Ellison, an author who 'invents little people in my mind and makes them have conversations' - a satirical spiral through the ways identity is performed, stereotyped and leveraged. Painter Ronald Jackson extrapolates that premise in his solo presentation An American Fiction at Galerie Myrtis in Baltimore.

The show works as a casting list for an imagined screenplay: a suite of new oil portraits, each titled in the same full-casting form of character, occupation and the actor playing them, all inside the film's title. A portrait of a Black man with dreadlocks and a red handkerchief is titled 'Pervis Brown: The Apprentice of Oddly Uncommon Trades, played by Cornelius Dunston in AN AMERICAN FICTION', and every painting in the room seeds the viewer's understanding of the fictional film.

Jackson's signature mask appears throughout, which he says signals that a rich, un-excavated narrative exists beneath the surface and asks viewers to distinguish the performer from the character being played. The move continues an earlier project in which he invented the recurring character Johnnie Mae King and invited the public to imagine her backstory through flash fiction; An American Fiction ran from 5 September to 3 October 2026.