U.S. artists imagining Mexico, Central America and Cuba, 1875-1910

This dissertation investigates representations of Mexico, Central America and Cuba produced by U.S. artists from 1875 to 1910. As the United States strengthened its political and economic ties with its closest southern neighbors, a desire for visual knowledge of the people and places just south of the border grew. Paintings, photographs, films and illustrations by artists such as Eadweard Muybridge, Winslow Homer and William Henry Jackson introduced an unfamiliar U.S. public to the ―Other‖ America. While some of these artists constructed a vision of Mexico, Central America and Cuba as picturesque places mired in the past and ripe for U.S. expansionist efforts, others portrayed these lands as sites of mounting tension that suggest anxiety surrounding the increasingly intimate relationship between the North and South. A careful analysis of these images, the contemporary responses to them and the socio-historical context in which they were created reveals another veiled subject—the United States and its struggle to define its own identity at a watershed moment in its history. A study of the visual manifestation of the United States' relationship with Mexico, Central America and Cuba is at the forefront of recent scholarship that seeks to extend the scope of American art beyond geographic borders, embracing a more global, non-Euro-centrist perspective.Ph. D.Includes bibliographical referencesIncludes vitaby Diana Bramha