New Books Network interviews Art History faculty member Maggie Cao about her new book for their New Books in Art podcast.

Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025) by Dr. Maggie Cao is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Dr. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre paintings, and ethnographic portraiture.

Revealing how the US empire was “hidden in plain sight” in the art of this period, Dr. Cao examines artists including Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer who championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project. She also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, and Yuki Kihara, Dr. Cao addresses important contemporary questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity. This book foregrounds an underacknowledged topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.

Congratulations to all our Studio Art students who received 2025 Undergraduate Awards!

Jonathan Sharpe Scholarship: Ivone Alexander, Cathy Wang

George Kachergis Scholarship: Britta Martin, Audrey Graham

Alexander Julian Prize: Georgia Phillips

Anderson Award: Charlotte Allsbrook, Danielle Daly

John C. Henry Award: Lanna Read, Jesse Patete, Sophia Karner

Penland School of Crafts Scholarship: Melody Dalili, Naari Short

In BEWILDERNESS, multidisciplinary artist Meg Stein presents new work that explores the connections between our internal and external ecosystems—our spiritual, emotional, and intellectual landscapes and the physical environment. The exhibition includes freestanding ceramic vessels, wall sculptures, drawings, a large-scale mixed-media installation, and a collaborative series of photographic portraits. These works express the complexity of human experience through vibrant, biomorphic, and geological forms, emphasizing the permeability between our inner selves and the outer world. This body of work marks a shift in Stein’s artistic practice towards uncovering the surprises that arise from an embodied experience of self-discovery. Stein’s inventive forms encourage us to engage with the lush and mysterious wilderness that exists both within and around each of us.

BEWILDERNESS is curated by Laura Ritchie and is on view at PORTAL from March 29 – April 27, 2025. PORTAL is located at 1320 Old Oxford Rd, Ste 7 in Durham.

In addition to an opening and a 3rd Friday reception, Meg Stein is organizing two Embodiment Practices workshops with other locally-based practitioners. She will lead a Sculpture and Meditation workshop and host an Artist’s Talk with the curator.
RSVP for BEWILDERNESS events here: bit.ly/bewilderness-2025.

BEWILDERNESS open hours will be each Saturday and Sunday from 2-6p.
RSVP for BEWILDERNESS open hours: https://bit.ly/bewilderness-open-hours.

Stein and Ritchie will be available for weekly meetings by appointment.
Sign up for an appointment here: https://calendly.com/meg-stein.

Events:

Saturday, March 29, 6-9pm: Opening Reception

Sunday, March 30, 11am-1pm: Embodiment Practices Workshop

Sunday, April 6, 11am-1pm: Embodiment Practices Workshop

Saturday, April 12, 7-9pm: Artist’s Talk

Friday, April 18, 6-9pm: 3rd Friday Reception

Thursday, April 24, 6-8pm: Sculpture & Meditation Workshop

Open hours: Saturdays & Sundays, 2-6pm, and by appointment.

Congratulations to David G. Frey Associate Professor of American Art Maggie Cao on the publication of her new book Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Painting US Empire is the first book to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism around the globe in the nineteenth century. In this work, art historian Maggie M. Cao crafts a nuanced portrait of nineteenth-century US painters’ complicity with and resistance to ascendant US imperialism, offering eye-opening readings of canonical works, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, genre paintings, and ethnographic portraiture. Revealing how the US empire was “hidden in plain sight” in the art of this period, Cao examines artists including Frederic Edwin Church and Winslow Homer who championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project. She also tackles the legacy of US imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past alongside global artists of the present. Pairing each chapter with reflections on works by contemporary anticolonial artists including Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, and Yuki Kihara, Cao addresses important contemporary questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity. This book foregrounds an underacknowledged topic in the study of nineteenth-century US art and illuminates the ongoing ecological and economic effects of the US empire.

Congratulations to Assistant Professor of Sculpture and Expanded Media Sherrill Roland for receiving the 2025 USA Fellowship Award!

Each year, United States Artists honors artists and cultural practitioners at all career stages, in all disciplines, throughout all of the United States and its island jurisdictions.

The USA Fellowship awards artists and collaboratives across the following disciplines: Architecture & Design, Craft, Dance, Film, Media, Music, Theater & Performance, Traditional Arts, Visual Art, and Writing. In addition to $50,000 in unrestricted funding, USA provides access to tailored services such as financial planning, career consulting, legal advice, and personal care.

for more info: unitedstatesartists.org

Congratulations to Mark Anthony Brown (MFA 2024) and Molly English (MFA 2024) for their acceptance into the 2025 class of Skowhegan!

Founded by artists, for artists, Skowhegan is an intensive nine-week summer program for emerging artists established in 1946.

Skowhegan is located on a 350-acre campus in central Maine. The nine-week summer program provides 65 emerging artists and 11 faculty artists with a collaborative and rigorous environment that is shaped by risk-taking, mentorship, and peer-to-peer exchange. Skowhegan does not consider financial ability or circumstances in its admissions process and, instead, focuses on an individual’s commitment to artmaking and inquiry. Founded by artists, for artists, the program provides an atmosphere in which participants are encouraged to work in contrast to market or academic expectations.

for more info: skowhegan

Congratulations to Professor of Art History Cary Levine and co-author Philip Glahn, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies at Temple University, who have received the College Art Association’s 2025 Frank Jewitt Mather Award for the book The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (MIT Press, 2024).

In The Future Is Present, Glahn and Levine tell the fascinating history of the visionary art group Mobile Image—founded by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz in 1977—which appropriated emerging technologies, from satellites to electronic message platforms. Based in Los Angeles, this under-studied collective worked amid urban crisis, a techno-boom, consolidating media power, and ascendant neoliberal politics. Mobile Image challenged fundamental conventions of the public sphere, democracy, communication, and political participation, as well as notions of power, representation, and identity.

Glahn and Levine argue not only for the historical importance of Mobile Image, but also for a critical artistic process that is at once analytic and transformative. They weave themes such as embodiment and its mediation, public/private dialectics, and techno-utopian vision throughout the book, binding these projects to discourses around race, gender, and class, as well as margin and center, the local and the global. In today’s world of ubiquitous digital re/production, networking, and social media, The Future Is Present shows how the work of Mobile Image continues to have profound implications for art, technology, and the politics of public and private experience.

The Frank Jewett Mather Award, first presented in 1963 for art journalism, is named in honor of the art critic, teacher, and scholar who was affiliated with Princeton University until his death in 1953. It is awarded for significant published art criticism that has appeared in publication in a one-year period; from September 1–August 31 of the year prior to the granting of the award in February.

The Frank Jewett Mather Award has been presented to many well-known art critics and writers. In the 1960s, awards were presented to Max Kozloff, Barbara Rose, and Clement Greenberg, while Lawrence Alloway, Rosalind Krauss, and Lucy R. Lippard were recipients in the 1970s. The Mather awards of the 1980s were given to Robert Hughes, Leo Steinberg, and Douglas Crimp, among others, followed by Eleanor Heartney, Arthur C. Danto, and Christopher Knight in the 1990s. In 2009, Boris Groys was honored for his essays in Art Power, which address curatorship and criticism of modern and contemporary art in public venues.

CAA, as the preeminent international leadership organization in the visual arts, promotes these arts and their understanding through advocacy, intellectual engagement, and a commitment to the diversity of practices and practitioners.

January 26, 2025, 2 pm. The event is free but space is limited so RSVP at Sherrill Roland Ackland Talk

Using Roland’s piece Processing Systems: Bonding as a jumping-off point, this artist talk and panel will explore artistic expression, the American carceral system, and the visualization of data. After a discussion of Roland’s monumental numerical portraits on view at the Ackland, Roland will be joined by panelists Bharati Zvara, Associate Professor in the Department of Maternal and Child Health (MCH) in the Gillings School of Global Public Health, and Kylie Seltzer, art historian and Carolina Public Humanities Zietlow Postdoctoral Fellow. The program will be moderated by Lauren Turner, associate curator for contemporary art and special projects at the Ackland.

Hello My Friend,
It has been a while and I have been busy behind the scenes with screenings, publications, and a new exciting piece headed to SFMOMA next month. Read announcements below for details.

The news feels so grim these days, I thought I would offer something to distract you. Consider this an art exercise for the weary. Grab your closest paints and follow along.

I plan to start up monthly tutorials again that I will share with my subscribers. Also, I am slowly building watercolor classes in the background. I will be looking for folks to beta-test these in the spring for free access to the content!

LINK HERE for free tutorial. Guaranteed to relax you. If you try it please let me know if it helped.

xo xo

joy tirade

 

Dear Friends and Colleagues,

I hope this newsletter finds you as well as one can be during these challenging times.  I am still digesting the U.S. election results and the break-up of the coalition in Germany.  Hopefully, we will find a way to get through this together.

In the meantime, I keep myself occupied with exhibitions and book preparations.  Join me for the opening reception of my solo show, The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall, at Deutsches Haus this Thursday, November 14, from 6-8 pm.

Moreover, I am continuing to work on my book and can now announce that it will be published in a German and English edition by DISTANZ (Berlin) in Spring 2025, which I am very excited about. In December, I will launch a fundraising campaign.

I wish you all the best. Stay strong!

Warmest wishes, Gesche

Solo Show at Deutsches Haus NYU

The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall will be exhibited in a solo exhibition at Deutsches Haus NYU from November 14, 2024, through February 7, 2025.

Please join me for the opening reception this Thursday, November 14, from 6-8 pm.  You may RSVP here. Address: Deutsches Haus NYU, 42 Washington Mews, New York, NY 10003.

Neue Landschaft 2 / New Landscape 2 (2024)
Collaged archival pigment prints, acid-free tape, bookbinding glue
7.67 x 10.43 inches
Quelle/Source: BArch MfS+HA_I+-Fo+349+Bild_0063+mast (and 0097, 0058, 0064, 0083, 0035)

You may wonder about what’s happening in this image.  The Ministerium für Staatssicherheit (MfS) (“Stasi”) documented the Wall and Death Strip in great detail since its inception in 1961.  I received copies of 160 panorama images from the Bundesarchiv and cut out the Wall and the Death Strip.  I then collaged the remains of the images to envision 23 new landscapes without the Berlin Wall.

NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship – Book

DISTANZ will publish The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall in German and English editions in the spring of 2025.  In December 2024, I will run a fundraising campaign where you can pre-order a copy of the book

If you are already interested in supporting the relatively expensive book production, you may make a fully tax-deductible donation (this only applies to U.S. taxpayers) through my NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship page.  Thank you in advance if you decide to do so.  I genuinely appreciate your help.

Deans’ Faculty Research Grant

I am grateful that I was awarded an NYU Tisch Dean’s Faculty Research Grant for my upcoming book, “The Absence and Presence of the Berlin Wall,” which will be published by DISTANZ in Spring 2025.

Neue Landschaft 8 / New Landscape 8 (2024)
Collaged archival pigment prints, acid-free tape, bookbinding glue
3.7 x 10.5 inches
Quelle/Source: BArch MfS+HA_I+Fo+1+Bild_0043+mast, MfS+HA_I+Fo+349+Bild_0023+mast (and 0065, 0073, 0090, 0092)

Oppressive Architecture (ICE Detention Centers)

I started thinking about this project during the 45th U.S. presidency, and with the current migrant crisis and deportation plans of the incoming administration, the topic is even more relevant.  With support from the NYU Undergraduate Research Assistants Program, Vallery Orr and I used Google Street View to document the hundreds of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facilities across the U.S.  According to the Border Report, roughly 40,000 migrants are currently held in ICE detention centers.  Screenshots from each facility will be compiled into a photographic installation to show the vastness of the inhumane system of housing thousands of migrants.  This project is a work in progress.