Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Maggie M. Cao has received the 2026 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for ‘Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and Its Legacies’, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2025.
Cao is a professor of art history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Charles C. Eldredge Prize is awarded annually by the Smithsonian American Art Museum for outstanding scholarship in American art. The prize recognises originality and thoroughness of research, excellence of writing and clarity of method.
The 2026 jury comprised Amy M. Mooney of Columbia College Chicago, Richard Meyer of Stanford University and Megan A. Smetzer of Capilano University. It called Cao’s book “a capacious and elegantly written study of how nineteenth-century American art gave visual form to the logics of the U.S. empire, and of how those logics continue to shape artistic practice today.”
Jennifer Sichel’s ‘Criticism Without Authority: Gene Swenson’s and Jill Johnston’s Queer Practices’ and Amanda Cachia’s ‘Hospital Aesthetics: Disability, Medicine, Activism’ were shortlisted for the 2026 prize.
Cao will deliver the Eldredge Prize Lecture on Wednesday, 10 March 2027.
