Maggie Cao
UNC | Department of Art and Art History
"Transplanting the Tropics in Nineteenth-Century America "
Wednesday, April 20, 2022
6 pm - 7:30 pm
Hayes Hall 403
AIA continuing education credits available (1 LU)
In the 1850s and 60s, two American landscape painters, the staunch Unionist Frederic Edwin Church and the Confederate sympathizer Louis Rémy Mignot, traveled extensively in the New World tropics. This lecture examines their South American and the Caribbean landscapes, arguing that“hothouse” plants and ruins helped construct the southern tropics as a colonial space defined by racial hierarchies. Working in a period of national division, Church’s and Mignot’s paintings also imagined ahemispheric tropics, wherein colonialism and emancipation linked foreign jungles to the plantation landscapes of the Civil War South.
Biography
Maggie Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Maggie Cao is the David G. Frey Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a specialist of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century American art. Her research focuses on the history of globalization, with particular interest in intersections of art with histories of technology, natural science, and economics. Her first book, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America, published in 2018, examines the fate of the nation’s preeminent artistic genre in the face of new conceptions of nature and physical alterations of terrain. Cao has also written on media theory, material culture, and ecocriticism. Her recent publications include essays on the print culture of the earliest worldwide financial bubbles and the materiality of export art made in eighteenth-century China. Cao is currently writing a book entitled Painting and the Making of American Empire, the first synthetic treatment of nineteenth-century U.S. art and empire in a global context.
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