Welcome to the New Books Network. Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Maggie Chow about her book titled Painting U.S. Empire, 19th Century Art and Its Legacies.
The book was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. And in this book, we get to look at a whole... bunch of different pieces of art, ways of making art that very much show the ways in which US imperialism in the 19th century was all over the place, was... complicit with US imperialism, sometimes was resisting the ascendancy of US imperialism, but really helps us take a different perspective on some pretty famous paintings, certainly of some places that maybe...
wouldn't expect to be thinking about in terms of U.S. imperialism in the 19th century, for example, polar expeditions, but also looking at ethnographic portraiture and a whole bunch of other things. So there's a lot of different kinds of art examined here.
and the lens through which this is done, I found really fascinating. So Maggie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thanks so much for having me. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a little bit and tell us why you decided to write this book? Sure. My name is Maggie Chow. I'm an associate professor of art history at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And my research focuses on the 18th and 19th century United States.
So I've long been interested in questions of globalization when it comes to artists and artworks and how they interface between different cultures and different places in an increasingly global world in that time period that I work on. So this book grew out of that interest. I wrote a first book about 19th century landscape painting in the United States. And many of the artists that I wrote about in that book traveled abroad to paint.
landscapes that were coded as exotic or otherworldly. And I became interested in the political implications of othering nature in that way. So the actually the first two chapters of this new book are about landscapes. And then I kind of expanded outward from there. The other motivation I had to write. What I think of as a broad art historical book about US imperialism around the globe in the 19th century is because I felt that there were similar books for the European.
period in European art, but not for the U.S. And a lot of that, I think, is cultural because U.S. Americans, you know, the general public doesn't tend to think of the United States as being an empire or having been an empire. And imperialism in the U.S. is often considered more continental, you know, associated with Western expansion in the 19th century into indigenous land. And most Americans, you know, today, even though the U.S. is still a global empire, don't realize it.
I really wanted to deal with this history that isn't studied as well as it should be. The other motivation, I think, is that US imperialism. is really important for us to look at as we grapple with the United States as this global power in the present. So, you know, the fact that the president in recent weeks has talked about. buying Greenland and taking over the Panama Canal is absolutely a legacy of this much longer history of empire that we should bring back to public attention.
As an art historian, I wanted to think about one of the ways in which this history of imperialism is visible, and it is actually very much everywhere in 19th century art. As U.S. art in that period becomes really global and subject matter, like, you know, picturing imported goods and foreign landscapes and foreign people, I really just wanted to.
you know, have a better understanding of the politics underlying that very global content. Lots of great reasons there. Thank you for laying out such clear foundations for our discussion. To make sure, though, that we are clear about the period of history you are discussing, can you clarify for us the time period you cover and how you chose those start and end dates?
Yeah, sure. So I start the book in the Civil War period. And this is because, you know, when I was talking about this increasingly global subject matter for U.S. artists and paintings in particular is... kind of associated with that period. And one of the areas of that growth is landscape painting, which at that time was considered the most important of all artistic genres in the United States. So that's where I began.
I end the book, historically, I end the book around 1898. And this is really specific, very specific date because it marks the official quote unquote official start of U.S. global imperialism with the annexation of Hawaii and the takeover of the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam from Spain after what's known as the Spanish-American War.
So that war and its aftermath have been the subject of other scholarly studies in art and visual culture. So I didn't want to focus on that. And instead, I really wanted to take a look at the decades preceding that moment. I am interested in thinking about imperialism more broadly than the textbook definition of territorial conquest. So in my book, I'm thinking about...
what historians often call informal imperialism. So that encompasses economic, scientific, technological, other forms of encroachment and assertions of unequal power relations. And so I'm... really thinking very broadly about what imperialism looks like in the decades around from the Civil War period to 1898. The other thing I should say is that the book doesn't really quite end in 1898 either, because I've interspersed these short chapters between the historical studies on contemporary art.
And I'm using these spaces to think about the legacies of U.S. imperialism today. That's definitely a point worth mentioning. I think we're going to talk a little bit about those interventions as we go. But I want to start perhaps with... As you said, the beginning of the book starts with some big landscape paintings that maybe don't look like they're dealing with imperialism at first glance. So I wonder if you could take us through, for example, The Vale of St. Thomas.
How might we view imperialism in this kind of painting? Sure. Yeah. So Bela St. Thomas is a large painting by Frederick Church, who's arguably the most famous. painter in the U.S. during the Civil War era and this is a painting set in Jamaica.
It offers this really expansive view from a high point in the landscape over this very lush, verdant scene that looks like it's just emerging from cloud cover. It's absolutely filled with really vibrant tropical vegetation, all painted in very exquisite detail.
So Church does this painting during a trip to Jamaica, which at the time was a British colony that had been used for sugar and coffee plantations. And by 1865, when he goes, this... it's very much reeling economically and socially after the end of slavery and the British Empire.
So other scholars have also looked at this painting and really thought about this history of empire and emancipation in relation to this artwork. And they really are looking at this painting as a metaphor for all that tumult that's come at the time. I'm something of a literalist, I guess, when it comes to reading landscape painting. And so I wanted to look at what was actually in the picture. So and it's mostly plants. So I started to research trips.
this trip that church took to Jamaica. And I learned that while he and his wife were there, they became absolutely enamored with ferns. Church's wife, Isabel, collected and pressed ferns that they brought back to their home in New York. And she even started a fern garden in their home.
Her husband in Frederick Church, meanwhile, while he was in Jamaica, was sketching ferns and painting ferns. He includes ferns in the Vale of St. Thomas painting. When he finishes the painting, it's for one of his patrons. a very wealthy woman in Hartford, Connecticut. He actually sends her the painting and a fern from Jamaica. So I was really looking into this obsession with ferns. not just for the churches, but, you know, Americans more generally.
I learned that ferns were very much wrapped up in what I think of as a kind of botanical imperialism of the period. So the ways that plants were moved around the globe, the ways they were collected and harvested as economic... resources, for instance, on the plantation, but also as scientific specimens. So plants became this way for me to think about how Americans in the United States understood and consumed
the American tropics as a colonial space, specifically for the Caribbean and also for South America in the 19th century. So in writing this chapter, I really... This is one of my favorite chapters to write because I was digging deep into primary sources. And one of the things I... got very invested in was interpreting the rhetoric of the sciences. And there are so many ways in which botanists at the time anthropomorphize plants. And so their discussions of plants became a window.
for understanding human culture more broadly and politics. Yeah, I'm glad you focused on the plants because that... I mean, visually in the painting, anyone who's not familiar with it, I encourage you to go look it up. The plants are very much there, but that's not, therefore, not talking about empire, right? As you've suggested, that's...
putting imperialism front and center. And it's not just in this painting. You've mentioned the science analysis that you get to look at, but there's also the idea, as you said, of the plants being moved around so much. Is there an archival potential of plants we can imagine? Yes, that's a great question. So I actually think a lot about the Plantis Archive in the intervention chapter.
that material on church. So this is the small chapter on contemporary art. And I wrote this chapter around the work of a contemporary artist, Maria Teresa Alves, and particularly this long-term project she's done. called Seats of Change. So let me explain the work and then I can sort of talk about the archival idea. So Alva is interested in the history of shipping, so specifically the triangle trade.
And so she's done research into finding ballast dump sites in historical port cities. So these are sites where ships historically dumped. the materials they carried for stability across the ocean. And at that time, ballast was made up of dirt and rocks from wherever the ship started. And they would arrive at their port for trade, and they would just dump all that material wherever they landed. And so seeds were inadvertently in this ballast, and they would make their way across the ocean.
These ballast seeds can actually be germinated from even after centuries long dormancy at these dump sites. So Alves' work is really about, you know. finding these seeds and then germinating them and creating these gardens, which... I think of as an effort to think of seeds as an archive of the past because these plants are in a way witnesses to the triangle trade that we can now kind of interrogate in the present.
So I really love this idea of plants as witnesses to human history and as storytellers for the future. And I think a lot about those ideas in that chapter. I found this a very interesting sort of theoretical intervention, I suppose, that definitely has applications beyond an individual painting.
But of course, there are many other paintings that add other things into our discussion here around how to view empire in them. So I wonder if we can move from the very tropical world of... all the ferns to something that seems completely different visually and yet still has a whole bunch of these ideas of imperialism and even you argue in the book racialized geography embedded in what at first glance does not
look like that. I wonder if we can talk about ice scapes. Yeah. So this chapter on the Arctic is like actually the first one that I conceptualized for the book. And so in some ways, it's a natural fit for the book, because we know that imperial ambition was behind all sorts of Arctic exploration in the past, even today, I suppose. And I wanted to think about...
But I wanted to think beyond this idea of the Arctic as terra nullius idea, you know, like the fact that the Arctic is still sort of this blank space on the map in the 19th century. And so that. you know, all these imperial powers who are sort of vying for control of who could understand that space better and discover new navigational routes that would allow them to have, you know. greater global power. So that's a story that I think has been told already about the Arctic and Arctic exploration.
And I think the ice scape, as you say, which is these landscapes of the Arctic that were painted in the 19th century, do do that. But they also go beyond that basic narrative. And I wanted to deal particularly with the ways that race was implicated in Arctic exploration in the United States since the peak of those expeditions, the exploration efforts, coincided with emancipation and the debates around emancipation.
So in the book, one of the things I do to make that connection between the Arctic, which we think of as, oh, well, it's about blankness and questions of race, is by thinking about various forms. that Americans were using to make sense of the Arctic. So Arctic exploration is, of course, about encountering a kind of landscape that's unfamiliar. And a lot of the ideas written about seeing form in the Arctic or making sense of what is otherwise a formless space, an all-white landscape.
was a kind of rhetoric connected with sculptural forms of seeing at the time. So particularly... ways of looking at neoclassical marble sculpture that was very popular in the middle of the 19th century. So this was an artistic genre that, if you imagine, you know, is a kind of resurrection of... classical antiquity. So sculptors were using white marble and they were creating ideal figures out of white marble.
white marble. And this artistic practice during the period was celebrating the idea of this ideal white body. So I'm really in the chapter, I look at what it means to find ideal white bodies in ice as well as ideal white bodies in marble. I also think about how ice. which was such a big topic of fascination in Arctic narratives, became actually in the 19th century a commodity that was shipped from the United States.
particularly the colder parts of the United States, like New England and the upper Midwest, to tropical places around the world, like the Caribbean and India, where it was used to cool beverages. for white colonists who wanted to bring this culture to the tropics in order to distinguish themselves as both culturally and biologically superior to the non-white local populations.
Paintings of the Arctic I'm trying to show in this chapter are actually deeply enmeshed in these other histories of empire where race is central. Dear old work platform, it's not you. It's us. Actually, it is you. Endless onboarding? Constant IT bottlenecks? We've had enough. We need a platform that just gets us. And to be honest, we've met someone new. They're called Monday.com. And it was love at first onboarding.
Their beautiful dashboards, their customizable workflows got us floating on a digital cloud nine. So no hard feelings, but we're moving on. Monday.com, the first work platform you'll love to use. So is it because of these shared ideas around imperialism? Is that why we find that it is, in fact, sometimes the same artists who want to both go to these, quote unquote, exotic tropical places? And they also want to go up to the Arctic. Is that why they want to do both?
I think some of it is that. I mean, you know, the tropics and the Arctic seem very different in ecological terms, but they're both subject to similar sorts of imperial ambitions at the time. And these ambitions were actually literally connected, right? I mean, like the shipping of ice from very cold places to very warm places as a kind of refreshments.
is an example of this. So, you know, it's true that that ice, that ship doesn't come from the actual Arctic circle, but it's actually the language of Arctic exploration gets used to discuss that kind of ice industry. You've talked about like cut up icebergs and things like that. So, you know, I think one of the other reasons that there is this. connection between the tropics and the Arctic in terms of empire at the time is because there was this really broad interest.
in climactic difference in the 19th century in many Americans and Europeans debated whether humans, but also plants and also animals could be adapted to living outside of their native climate. So you can imagine why this adaptive. adaptability is relevant for say, plantation agriculture, forced labor, colonial rule, all of these things. And so these physical parts of the globe that exhibit kind of extremes of climate are really wrapped up in these discussions around.
the theories of empire all right definitely helpful to have that framework otherwise it does look like very different things going on but turns out we can very much understand the links between them What about if we move to a different kind of painting? So from landscapes to still life paintings, even specific genres within still life paintings. I found this phrase fascinating, quote.
They have the unique potential to highlight disturbing realities of imperial ideology and colonial experience. That's a lot to put on a still-life painting titled, for example, Homage to a Parrot. What's going on here? Sure. So you're referring to a chapter that I wrote about still life, but it's specifically, it's not about still life in general, but about this.
hyper-realistic style of still life called trompe l'oeil, which literally means to fool the eye. So this is the kind of painting that was extremely popular in the late 19th century United States. And many of them, many of these paintings depicted imported goods. So that one painting of the parrot is sort of the centerpiece of this chapter that I write. And it depicts, it is a hyper-realistic.
picture of a taxidermy parrot by an artist called Scott Evans. And it showcases this stuffed bird in a case. And the parrot was a kind of common parlor pet of the period. But this particular painting makes it look like the parrot is on display in some kind of... moldy natural history museum. And the reason I became really fascinated by this painting is that in the painting, there is a label that...
tells this kind of fictionalized story about the bird that's pictured. And the label is actually written in French, even though the painter was American and it was a painting that was, you know. just debuted probably in New York City. So the label says something like, you know, this is a parrot who came from South America and was brought to France where it learned to speak the French language.
So the label is meant to be funny and humor was quite standard in trompe l'oeil painting of this period. But this particular sort of humor, I make a, you know, I make a case for why it has this. is this darker political undertone. So one of the reasons I have this, you know, one of the reasons I think this painting is kind of dark. is because taxidermy itself was an enterprise tied to imperial science. So, you know, the collection of specimens from...
colonial spaces was tied up with the growth of taxidermy as a practice because it was a way to preserve these specimens that couldn't be transported across all these oceans. It was a way for museums in imperial centers. to display their power over the rest of the world. I also write about how language is a form of power in colonial context because that label references this idea of the parrot speaking French.
And one of the reasons that trompe l'oeil interests me, and not just still life in general in this chapter, is because it's actually not seen as a highbrow art at the time. It was regarded as this middle class form of introduction. entertainments, and trompe l'oeil artists were therefore accused of being unsophisticated mimics. So not unlike parrots, for instance, who...
only repeat language. They don't comprehend language. So these artists were a kind of like an underclass of the art world. And in paintings like this parrot picture, I'm really thinking about how these artists may have been adopting this subaltern position. So having this kind of like sympathy with the parents who also can represent like a subaltern class within. colonial world.
Very interesting change of perspective there. And as you mentioned, that is what you're doing with these kind of interventions throughout the book. So you gave us an example of one earlier, but there are multiple of these interludes. How did you choose what to include in this way? Yeah, great question. So it was really important for me to...
Well, it was really important for me to have this book tell a kind of trans-historical story that didn't just end in 1898 as if imperialism is a thing of the past. And I wanted to think a lot about the consequences of U.S. interventions around the world and how they're felt today. many, many artists working today with anti-colonial practices that deal with the history of U.S. intervention. So there were so many artists I could have chosen to write these chapters on.
What I did was I gravitated towards artists and artworks that had some very direct material link to the historical artworks that I write about. So the more direct the connection, the better. mean is by that is like I was looking for material things that connect to them rather than say influence so it's not that the artists the contemporary artists weren't necessarily looking at the historical artworks that I'm
studying. In some cases, that may be true, but in most cases, that's not the connection that I'm referring to. So for instance, in the still life chapter, For the intervention chapter, I focus on the artwork of Nicholas Galanin, who's a Native Alaskan artist who's worked in taxidermy as an artistic medium. And that was what drew me to his work.
as opposed to the work of other artists who may be engaged with still life or with animals. The connection of the taxidermy and the fact that the parrot in the historical chapter is a taxidermy parrot really allowed me to... put those artists into dialogue more directly. And in other cases, there were often these uncanny parallels between the past and the present that prompted me to choose a particular artist. So there's this performance work that I write about by a contemporary artist.
Cuban artist named Carlos Martial in the last intervention of the book. And I chose that piece because in the work, the artist poses his body. in a way that is almost exactly the same as in this watercolor painting by Winslow Homer of a Black Mariner. So it's almost like there are these visual twins across time. And I actually doubt that Martiel has... ever looked at that Homer piece it's not that he was copying it or referencing it but nevertheless I think it
that kind of those strange visual parallels show the ways in which thinking across time is relevant for the present. And so it's around these kind of direct links between the past and the present that I'm building my argument. the legacy of US empire. It goes back to what you were saying earlier about kind of interpreting these things literally, you know, looking at what's actually right there and going, hang on a second, what is the link? And I think the interlude pairings definitely show that.
But moving to a different section of the book, we've talked about landscapes, we've talked about still lifes. What about the act of painting itself? In what ways was that a colonial tool and strategy for imposing particular ideas in an imperialist way? Yeah, so I became interested in modes of representation, you know, whether different modes of representation could have a colonial meaning or could be imposing. a kind of imperial epistemology.
So the chapter in which I really focus on that is one that is about Jean Lafarge, who was this painter, but also he's most famous for designing. stained glass windows. And in the 1890s, he and his friend Henry Adams, who was this Harvard historian of very well-connected gentlemen, took this grand tour of the Pacific.
So these are very privileged people with extensive networks, and that allowed them to interact with colonial governments and indigenous leaders and all these various places that they visited. So I write. specifically about their time in Samoa and Tahiti. And I'm thinking about connecting in that chapter, connecting their paintings and writings to imperial ideas of temporality, around temporality.
as a way of knowing the world. So Lafarge, while he's traveling, especially in Samoa, he painted these watercolors of... Indigenous dancers, and he became very obsessed with Indigenous forms of dance. And he thought a lot about how time and tempo could not be visualized in painting. Meanwhile, Adams, who's trained as a historian, was trying to make sense of Indigenous understandings of ancestry through his Western academic training.
And it just so happens that dance, though Lafarge probably did not fully comprehend it, was also a form of understanding ancestry. So essentially, we have these two privileged white Americans coming into Indigenous communities in Oceania with their Eurocentric understandings of how to understand time and history and trying to make sense.
of indigenous ways of knowing that contradict their own assumptions. And this is all happening at the same time that the US and European countries are imposing standardized time zones around the globe. based on industrial forms of timekeeping. So this chapter really allows me to sort out these conflicting concepts of time and how time is visualized through. these colonial practices such as painting and historical narrative.
This was really fascinating to read about in the book, the ways in which kind of paintings and impositions of time can go together. And in some senses we're kind of... getting bigger and bigger in our lens as we go through our discussion starting with a specific landscape painting to then an entire sort of genre of still life and the artists within it and the way they're conceptualized now we're talking about the imposition of ideas through
painting, let's go bigger. Can you tell us about how and why you conceptualize and center the ocean as we get to chapter five in the book? Sure. Yeah. Well, the ocean actually is in all the chapters in a strange way. It is kind of the mode in which imperialism takes shape for the U.S. in the 19th century, because, you know, there's a lot of islands featured in this book. There's a lot of navigation.
navigation, maritime navigation featured in the book. There's a lot of things moving across oceans in the book. So the ocean is everywhere, but you're right. The ocean is really at the center of the last chapter. So this is a chapter about Winslow Homer. who's arguably one of the best remembered 19th century U.S. painters. He spent several winters in the Caribbean as a tourist in the 1890s and was quite prolific as a watercolor painter during this time.
travels in particular. And while he is traveling, particularly to the Bahamas, which he goes to and then returns to, one of his favorite subjects to paint there were the black divers. And so these divers were employed in the sponging industry. So the Bahamas at that time was the largest. exporter and processor of sea sponges, which were used just like today. We use the synthetic sponges we use to wash our dishes and such.
These divers that Homer depicted were employed in that industry, but with the rise of tourism in the Bahamas, which begins in the second half of the 19th century. And in fact, Homer's... own watercolors were used to promote tourism in the Bahamas and like one magazine article about that. Anyway.
So as tourism rises in the Bahamas, these divers begin to pivot to the tourism industry. And they already have small boats, which you're using for sponging. So they basically repurpose those boats to take. these influx of white tourists on tours of the coral reefs that surround the Bahamas.
which are known at the time to be quite spectacular. And this is essentially, you can imagine this as like a precursor to the glass bottom boat tours that, you know, very much are still part of the Caribbean tourist experience. So in this chapter, I write about the different relationships that white visitors and Black local people had to the ocean in the Caribbean.
And Homer is this particularly interesting artist to think about that through because he was known very much as an artist of the ocean. He painted a lot of scenes of... oceanic peril around new england so shipwrecks and drownings and things like that um he lived in new england so he this was kind of the kinds of pictures that made him famous. And they're still considered his masterpieces today.
So I take some of his sensitivity to the dangers of the ocean to think about the ways that he's visualizing these Black mariners in a different part of the world. And it allows me to engage with questions of the ocean. ocean as a source of peril, the ocean as a source of pleasure, the ocean as a space that is, whether that is a space that is friendly to the body or an enemy to the body and, you know, questions like that.
Absolutely fascinating to see a whole area at the end of the book focused on the oceans, especially as you correctly pointed out, the oceans are there throughout. So they kind of get their moment to be right at the center at the end, which is definitely... worthwhile given the number of different things happening with oceans in our discussion. Before I ask you what you're working on next, is there anything else about this book you want to make sure we highlight? Well, I think...
I'm really interested in thinking about how artists of the past and the present engage with each other. So this book was sort of an experiment in thinking across time. And I'm really interested in what... readers will think about how that adds to our understanding of the past, but also to our understanding of the present.
Is this the sort of thing then that you're continuing to work on? Do you have a next project in mind? Anything you want to highlight or preview for us? Sure. So I actually, I would say there's two lines of inquiry. from this book that have stuck with me that are part of the beginnings of a next project for me. So one is actually plants. So I really love Teresa.
Marie-Tres Alves' book, Work with the Ballast Seeds, and actually inspired me to think more about what we talked about, that archival potential of plants and plants as storytellers. The other thread is... time that came out came out of this chapter on the farge and this imposition of temporality as a form of colonialism and so i'm actually now working on this project centered on trees and the ways in which
ecological and industrial concepts of time come together in trees in the 19th century. So for example, I'm researching things like the origins of dendrochronology. which is the science of tree rings, reading tree rings. I'm looking at the history and culture around witness trees, which are these individual trees that serve as the natural monuments of historic events. signings of particular treaties or the beginnings of military engagements, things like that. And as well, I'm thinking about...
wood-based artistic media like sculpture, basketry, charcoal drawing even. So that's where my thinking has gone. It's definitely grown out of this empire book. Well, if any listeners want to get more details about this empire book that we've been discussing, it is titled Painting U.S. Empire, 19th Century Art and Its Legacies, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025. Maggie thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Thank you for having me.