Introduction

Abstract

This suite of essays locates North American art within a network of transnational negotiations shaped by imperialist expansion, dispossession of Indigenous nations, and the transatlantic slave trade. Each text focuses on a single object originating from seemingly disparate locales, such as Virginia, Upper Peru, Britain, Brazil, Jamaica, and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and explores the object’s relationship to a formative institutional setting—including an academy, a university, a museum, and a workshop. Studying them in concert reveals Atlantic art institutions not only as sites for the generation and replication of ideologies of difference, but also as sites occupied by diverse actors, including Indigenous diplomats and enslaved Africans, who experienced art institutions as sites of unfreedom and labor, as well as diplomacy, self-fashioning, and even self-liberation.