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

October 23–24, 2026

Hager Auditorium, Museum of the Rockies
600 W. Kagy Blvd., Bozeman, MT 59717

Join us in Bozeman for two days of new scholarship on creativity and migration in the second half of the nineteenth century, with a special focus on Black and Afro-Indigenous artists, designers, and performers who sought freedom, opportunity, and fortune beyond the formal boundaries of the United States. The symposium features a keynote conversation between Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody (Stanford University) and Dr. Tiya Miles (Harvard University), and coincides with the exhibition Chisel & Razor: The Artistic Legacies of Edmonia & Samuel Lewis at Tinworks Art and the Museum of the Rockies.

In her study of the thousands of formerly enslaved people who left the South for Kansas after the Civil War, historian Nell Irvin Painter observed that "the prospect of leaving the region entirely for truly free soil fired the imaginations of Blacks who realized that their oppression was inextricably bound up with Southern or perhaps American life." Historians of the American West have since adopted Painter's term "Exoduster" to describe the complex settler politics of African Americans who moved westward to escape violence, economic exploitation, and social exclusion.

Though we now think of them as Americans, Exodusters and their white settler peers understood themselves to be leaving the United States when they entered the territories. On the Edge of American places these westward migrants alongside the expatriate artists who crossed the Atlantic to build careers abroad, tracing connections among America's edges in communities as far-flung as the American West, the Caribbean, and Western Europe. Drawing on Joseph Roach's "circum-Atlantic" framework, which decenters the United States in histories of the Americas, the symposium attends not only to painting, sculpture, and photography but also to performance and the more ephemeral forms of culture that itinerant artists carried with them.

FREE PUBLIC PROGRAM

Friday, October 23

9:45am · Welcome Remarks

10:00 am–12:00 pm · Panel I
Dr. Elizabeth Spear, Cleveland Museum of Art, "Edmonia Lewis's Indian Combat"
Dr. Regina Gee, Montana State University, "Edmonia Lewis and Cleopatra VII in Rome"
Dr. Melissa Benbow Flowers, "Around (Half) the World in 80 Days: Lewis's Journey from Rome to California (and Back)"

1:30–3:30 pm · Keynote: Moving Stones: A Conversation About Edmonia Lewis
Dr. Jennifer DeVere Brody, Stanford University, in conversation with Dr. Tiya Miles, Harvard University
Followed by book signing and tabling

Saturday, October 24

10:00 am–12:00 pm · Panel II
Dr. Anthony Wood, "Grafton Tyler Brown: Passing Through Yellowstone, 1886–1892"
Prof. Leah Sutton, Greenville University, "Selling Shadows: The Visual Language of Shadow and Silhouette"
Dr. Theresa Leininger-Miller, University of Cincinnati, "On Last Chance Gulch: J. P. Ball's Execution Series (1896) in the New State of Montana"
Ms. Candice Yates, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Highlights from The James Van Der Zee Archive: Meditations on Loss and Community"

1:30–3:30 pm · Collecting & Curating Roundtable
Dr. Walter O. Evans, Collector, Savannah, GA
Dr. Shawnya L. Harris, Georgia Museum of Art
Dr. Jeffrey Richmond-Moll, Peabody Essex Museum
Moderated by Dr. Melissa Ragain, Montana State University

SPONSORED BY MSU College of Arts & Architecure
with support from: