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On the Edge of American: Art, Exodusters, and Expatriates, 1850-1900

Type: Calls For Papers [View all]
Posted by: Montana State University
Deadline: Thu, January 1st, 2026

This conference foregrounds new scholarship on creativity and migration during the Victorian era, with a special focus on the contributions of Black and Indigenous artists, designers, and performers. Moderated by Dr. Tiya Miles, with a keynote by Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, the symposium will focus on the many forms that creativity took from 1850-1900 as artists-of-color sought freedom, opportunity, and fortune outside the formal boundaries of the United States.  

In her analysis of the post-civil war exodus by thousands of former slaves to the Kansas Territory, the historian Nell Irvin Painter gives us the evocative term “Exoduster” to describe the complex settler politics spurring the arrival of Blacks to the American West. Painter describes how a determined movement westward to escape enslavement, violence, economic exploitation, and social exclusion was shaped by the “realization that for them, oppression was inextricably bound up with Southern or perhaps American life.” While we understand them as Americans, both Exodusters and their white settler peers understood themselves as emigrating outside the U.S. when they entered the territories, where opportunities for personal reinvention and economic success awaited. Passage of the Homestead Act and Morrill Act in 1862, for example, made land ownership and higher education more accessible to women arriving in the ‘unclaimed’ land of the western frontier.  

Concurrently, women and artists-of-color sought freedom, opportunity, and social belonging abroad as part of the larger cultural phenomenon of the Grand Tour. In many ways a counterpoint to the experiences of the Exodusters in the ‘uncultivated’ lands of the free-soil American West, expatriate artists were plunged into the historic centers of cultural production as generated by the construction of Grand Tour Europe. There they lay their own claims upon the grand tradition and the ancient world while connecting with a patron class and a critical apparatus that could secure their place within the history of American art. 

“On the Edge of American” explores the parallel experiences of these “Exodusters” and the expatriate artists who traversed the Atlantic to build careers abroad. Within the fine arts, presenters are invited to discuss the work of artists such as James Presley Ball, Robert Duncanson, Edmonia & Samuel Lewis, Grafton Tyler Brown, Taylor Gordan, Nelson A. Primus, and Henry O. Tanner. However, we also encourage scholars to consider the more ephemeral forms of cultural production in which itinerant artists were engaged, including stage performances. 

Please submit a 300-word abstract, a paper title, and current CV by January 1, 2026, to melissa.ragain@montana.edu and regee@montana.edu  Selected speakers will be notified on March 1, 2026, and are expected to accept or decline the offer within one week of notification. Accepted papers will be presented in 20 minutes, followed by Q&A discussions. We welcome submissions from a variety of disciplines, including fine art, art history, visual studies, media and cinema studies, history, sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and political science. 

The symposium will take place on Oct 23-24, 2026, in the Hagar Auditorium of the Museum of the Rockies.

Posted on Fri, August 1st, 2025
Expires on Thu, January 1st, 2026

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