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"This book is the first to offer a synthetic account of art and US imperialism in the nineteenth century. Maggie M. Cao offers revisionist readings of history paintings of the colonial past, landscapes of polar expeditions and tropical tourism, still lifes of imported goods, and ethnographic portraiture. Revealing how the US empire was "hidden in plain sight" in the art of this period, Cao examines artists who both championed and expressed ambivalence toward the colonial project, and she connects these historical examples to current questions around representation, colonialism, and indigeneity, examining contemporary works by Maria Thereza Alves, Tavares Strachan, Nicholas Galanin, Yuki Kihara, and Carlos Martiel. Connecting historic American paintings to the flows of commodities and peoples through colonial systems in the decades leading up to 1898, Cao tackles the legacy of American imperialism, examining Euro-American painters of the past and racially diverse global artists of the present. Foregrounding an overlooked topic in the study of nineteenth-century American art, she shows that these works allow us to better understand the ongoing ecological and economic effects of US empire"--