In the era of the second Trump administration, the United States, a settler colonial nation that from its foundation has been invested in the expansion of its power and reach across space and over peoples, is living in a moment of especially overt imperial rhetoric. From the president’s insistence on calling the “Gulf of Mexico” the “Gulf of America” to administrative ruminations over Canadian entrance into the union or seizing control of Greenland, the ongoing nature of American imperialism is apparent in word and deed. Importantly, these are not new developments tied only to the political party in power, nor are they recurrences of imperial practice buried in the past. Rather, they are evidence of the way that colonial empire constitutes the very DNA of the project of the United States, motivating its actions in North America and beyond from the time of the republic’s foundation.

Maggie M. Cao’s Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies explicitly frames its inquiry into the role of art in American empire building through the lens of both the legacies of colonialism and its ongoing role in US culture. Examining the work of Frederic Edwin Church, De Scott Evans, John La Farge, and Winslow Homer, the book contextualizes some of the nineteenth century’s most well-known white male American artists within the colonial, racial, and political discourses of their day. Interspersed between its chapters are five “interventions” which take up the work of a range of Indigenous, Black, and Latine contemporary artists from across the Americas whose cultural and ecological engagements the author analyzes as a counterpoint to her historic research. These sections extend the argument and frame the book’s historic study of American imperialism as “episodes of a much longer narrative that extends into an uncertain future” (10).

Chapter one considers Church’s South American landscapes, relating period interests in ferns to his representation of the tropics as a site of wildness and ruin. The chapter contends that the twin forces of botanical collection and painterly representation made the “American tropics into a colonial space that required cultivation and management” (52). Chapter two stays with Church among other artists who traveled to and represented the Arctic. Connecting landscapes of icebergs to the newly popularized commodity of ice, Cao argues for the imperial as well as racial dimensions of this material and its representational qualities. Together, these two chapters draw connections between American colonial efforts in both the polar North and the Southern tropics by illuminating how artists like Church followed the same global trade routes that shaped US imperial networks. Chapter three takes up the trompe l’oeil pictures of De Scott Evans, considering their subjects and modes of representation alongside the burgeoning global circulation of goods in the nineteenth century. As a corrective to other treatments of still life and trade, Cao stresses the way these works provide a window into “the commercial structures of US imperialism” (107). The chapter opens with Evans’ Homage to a Parrot (ca. 1890), which features a taxidermy bird, and explores the colonial and anticolonial potentials of taxidermy as well as the form’s relation to high art in both the nineteenth century and contemporary moment. Chapter four considers watercolors, paintings, and glasswork by John La Farge depicting Samoan siva dancers from the artist’s travels in the Pacific. Interpreting these works alongside his travel companion’s letters and writings, Cao examines how the Western travelers sought to capture and describe Indigenous forms of knowledge and culture. Cao’s argument is built on the premise of painting as a Western form of knowledge production and dissemination and dwells on the interpretive possibilities of the medium’s failures to represent Indigenous knowledge-ways. A central theme of the chapter is time, and Cao reads both nineteenth-century imperial efforts at standardizing time as well as Indigenous conceptions of deep time into the art. Chapter five turns to Winslow Homer’s oil paintings and watercolors made in the context of his repeated trips to the Bahamas in his later years. While these works—particularly the artist’s monumental painting The Gulf Stream (1899–1900)—have been much discussed in art historical literature, Cao argues that such treatments have over-emphasized their possible symbolic dimensions versus their literal and material representation of ocean and place. Following this, she considers these works alongside US imperial involvement in the Caribbean, connecting both military and tourist activities in the region. Her reading of the artist’s watercolor depictions of Black divers in the Bahamas highlights how the figures’ immersion in the water signals a departure from Homer’s other representations of mariners around the Atlantic in order to explore ideas about labor, freedom, and physical sovereignty in the US national and imperial context.

An important framework for the book is the nuanced ways in which Cao defines nineteenth-century empire and relates artistic production to it. In a period when the United States’ colonial aspirations did not manifest in the same extensive overseas holdings as European empires, Cao looks to networks of economic trade, scientific exchange, tourism, and culture to identify the empire’s ideological and practical infrastructure. These produced what Cao characterizes as “the subtler visuality of US empire” (7). Rather than the overt images of imperial conflict, colonized peoples, or territorialized land that define European imperial art history, Cao locates evidence of US empire’s construction and operation in non-US landscapes or a trompe l’oeil still life that are less evidently about colonial power. While the question of whether the imperial expression of such works is as sublimated as Cao claims is debatable, the result of this approach is a more expansive view of the forms and operations of imperial art. She creatively locates evidence of global imperialist ways of thinking and perceiving in often unexpected formal and material aspects of the works she examines.

Cao is explicit in stating that the book’s five “interventions” which follow each chapter serve to bring the “metropolitan Euro-American painters of the past into conversation with more diverse global artists of the present” (10). This strategy  has been adopted by other art historians in recent works, most notably Anna Arabindan-Kesson’s Black Bodies, White Gold: Art, Cotton, and Commerce in the Atlantic World (Duke University Press, 2021) which explores the artistic representation and contemporary legacies of nineteenth-century art, commerce, and colonialism in the Atlantic World. In Painting US Empire, it is a means of emphasizing the ongoing nature of American imperialism and explicitly connecting its nineteenth-century forms and legacies to the contemporary political moment. However, in the context of the book as a whole, it also suggests that nonwhite perspectives on American imperialism only exist in the present day. The historic chapters by and large lack any evidence that the nineteenth-century people who experienced colonialism in the regions Cao discusses spoke about or left a record of their own perceptions of these political and cultural dynamics. While the chapters on the Arctic and the Pacific do include some quotations from Indigenous people, they are the exception. This discrepancy is one that Cao somewhat unsatisfyingly addresses in the final intervention which acts as a conclusion. Its final line asserts that “If we are to continue to study and admire . . . the work of . . .canonical, white US artists of the past, then we must do so with a radical empathy for their subjects, who can only recover their voice and agency through contemporary proxies” (239). While it is certainly true that the colonial archive diminishes, marginalizes, and at times erases the voices of Black and Indigenous communities among others, Cao’s statement is troubling given important recent scholarship in the humanities, including by those studying the art and material culture of the Americas such as Tiffany Momon, Bart Pushaw, Matthew Rarey, Jennifer Van Horn, Sophie White, and Caroline Wiggington, which has worked to locate and amplify these very historic voices. The result is a diminishment of the agency of those very subjects that Cao looks to uplift within the book’s larger project.

In our contemporary moment, recent exhibitions and installations of American art in the United States have also been attuned to the question of how to visualize and interpret historic instances of US colonialism and empire in the context of the nation’s present-day realities. Like Painting US Empire, such projects take a global and transhistorical view of American art. In the past year, projects such as Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Knowing the West: Visual Legacies of the American West at Crystal Bridges American Art Museum, and The Shape of Power: Stories of Race and American Sculpture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum have used strategies that include innovative gallery interpretation and the interpolation of historic and contemporary art works to explore the national and global dimensions of American history such as slavery, racism, Indigenous displacement, and migration as dynamics that are simultaneously past and present. It is interesting to consider how material works of art encountered in the gallery make different affordances for these kinds of reflections. In each of these cases, the dynamic space of the exhibition allows visitors to consider together multiple perspectives across space and time. Through their gathering together of work by diverse historical as well as contemporary artists and makers, these displays do not dwell on the colonial master narrative of US policy, they also visualize the agency and identity of peoples and places that have been impacted by and resisted its imperial legacies. Together, such recent scholarship and museum work prompt continued consideration of how art historians frame and scrutinize without reinscribing the dynamics of colonial empire that defined the formation of the United States and continue to animate its politics today.

The author would like to gratefully acknowledge Bart Pushaw whose conversation and insights informed some of the ideas in this essay.