VIRTUAL: The Fruits of Empire: A Book Talk About Art, Food, and Racism with Shana Klein, PhD, AB ’05

Join the WashU Alumni Association for a virtual conversation featuring Shana Klein, PhD, AB ’05, author of The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. Angela Miller, Professor of Art History and Archaeology, will be moderating the event.

Still-life paintings of food look innocent at first sight. Pictures of bowls bulging with oranges and grapes were fashionable in American dining rooms, but were fruits merely delicious gems in pretty pictures to admire? The Fruits of Empire argues otherwise. This book talk will discuss Klein's research on representations of food to understand how they reflected and shaped conversations about race and national expansion in the United States. In a moderated discussion, Klein will discuss the paintings, photographs, and silverware objects in her book and ask: Who do images of food serve? And at whose expense? The results are not always delicious.

About Shana Klein:
Shana Klein is a professor and historian of American art. She holds a PhD in Art History from the University of New Mexico, where she completed the dissertation—and now book—The Fruits of Empire: Art, Food, and the Politics of Race in the Age of American Expansion. This book investigates food in paintings, photographs, advertisements, and cookbooks to understand how representations of fruit pressed upon the nation's most heated debates over race and citizenship. Klein has been awarded several fellowships for this research at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, among others. Klein’s research interests include American visual culture, food studies, race and post-colonial studies, and art and social justice. 

About Angela Miller:
Angela Miller is a professor of art history at Washington University in St. Louis. She is author of Empire of the Eye: Landscape Representation and American Cultural Politics, 1825-1875; and lead author, along with Janet Berlo, Bryan Wolf, and Jennifer Roberts, of American Encounters: Cultural Identity and the Visual Arts from the Beginning to the Present (Pearson, 2008). She has published widely on 19th and 20th century visual arts and culture. Her current book project, Countermoderns, is on the queer circle of Lincoln Kirstein in the years around World War II and has received funding from the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the NEH.