A portrait of US president William McKinley opens the Smithsonian National Gallery’s exhibit 1898: U.S. Imperial Visions and Revisions. At first blush, the work appears exemplary of conventional presidential portraiture. However, when one notes that the portrait was completed just weeks after the US military occupation of Puerto Rico and months before it would officially become a US colony with the signing of the 1898 Treaty of Paris, one wonders if perhaps Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller had a much more critical message to convey in this work. Upon closer inspection, the viewer notices that McKinley has in his grasp a rolled-up map of Puerto Rico. This map does not merely represent a Caribbean archipelago to be seized and possessed: It represents the lives, histories, and fates of a people for which neither the map nor the portrait itself can account. Akin to the exhibition itself, Oller’s painting subtly draws the viewer’s attention to other voices, visions, and narratives that dominant (hi)stories about US empire often minimize, silence, or erase altogether.

Curated by Taína Caragol and Kate Lemay, this boldly ambitious exhibit recounts a visual narrative about the convergence and intertwining of diverse (hi)stories leading to the emergence of the United States as an overseas empire in 1898. Across ten corridors flanking the exposition space, it not only presents—primarily through portraiture—the histories and cultures of US empire but also those of the insular and archipelagic places that would be either brought under its military protection (Cuba), annexed (Hawai’i), or incorporated as colonies (Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam) as a result of the “Wars of 1898”—a term coined by the exhibit curators to refer to the Cuban and Philippines wars for independence against Spain (1895 and 1896, respectively), the Spanish-American War (1898), and the Philippine-American War (1899-1903). By doing so, it presents how 1898 was experienced, seen, and narrated from within as well as without the US’s shifting geopolitical borders. In addition to portraits and photographs of political figures, military leaders, intellectuals, writers, and others from these aforementioned spaces, the exhibit includes, amongst others, landscape and battle-scene paintings; political cartoons and clippings from the press; archival documents (from legal petitions to medical records); and geographical, historical, and ethnographic publications pertaining to each space. Through this diverse collection, the exhibit offers a more expansive idea of portraiture while bringing to the fore the socio-political and cultural debates in which these portraits were engaged. Putting these works into conversation with each other, the exhibit reactivates historical dialogues occurring across these spaces while simultaneously shedding light onto the respective worlds, experiences, and cultures of diverse populations.

The organization of the exhibit follows a developmental narrative about the rise of US empire—one prefaced within a longer history of settler colonialisms, territorial expansions, and forced migrations and political disenfranchisement of peoples within its borders. This narrative trajectory may be unsurprising since the exhibit is a primarily organized for a US viewership and by a US national institution whose own mission is “to tell the story of America by portraying the people who shape the nation’s history, development and culture.” However, what is surprising is when the viewer takes a closer look at many of the works presented in which the US appears only as a minor character if it appears at all. Such works recount other histories as much from different perspectives as through other cultural forms that draw attention to other ways of narrating history (e.g., Amos Bad Heart Bull’s Battle of Grass), expressing belonging (e.g., James M. Vickroy’s Afro-American Historical Family Record), or asserting sovereignty (e.g., the portrait of Queen Lili’uokalani). Important counterpoints to dominant US historical narratives, these works even disrupt the very overarching narrative that structures the exhibit itself to announce that the story of 1898 does not belong to the US alone. By showcasing key historical figures, diverse histories, and cultural production of Hawai’i, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, the exhibit underscores the agency of local actors, focalizes their active engagements with US empire, and asserts these were not peoples without histories prior to US interventions in their affairs. Moreover, it reminds us that the various conflicts of 1898 did not only take place on the battlefields of war but also in the fields of politics, knowledge production, public opinion, and cultural production.

The exhibit also challenges viewers to consider (dis)connections between distinct places and peoples brought under US empire. Despite the partitioning of the exhibit into discreet corridors representing each insular and archipelagic place, the exhibition is most effectively provocative when such divisions are blurred—whether in the interstitial spaces between corridors or the open spaces between opposite-facing corridors. One example in particular is Cuban painter Miguel Díaz Salinero’s 1942 portrait of Cuban revolutionary José Martí, which, from across the main hall in an opposite corridor, faces a portrait of the American novelist Mark Twain. It is an encounter of gazes across the exhibition space that provokes the viewer to consider the dialogue between these portraits and imagine a conversation between the historical figures whose likenesses they render. Another example is an 1899 photograph that depicts political figures from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines together in Washington DC. While it is known that representatives from each archipelago traveled to the American capital to advocate for their respective homelands, little is known about this historical cross-colonial encounter. Just like the exhibit itself, this photo provokes the viewer to query about such encounters in order to imagine what words these men exchanged with each other, and, by extension, what kind of dialogue might emerge between distinct peoples, histories, and cultures when brought together.

Because the exhibit covers much historical, geographical, political, and cultural grounds, it is easy to get lost in the various histories that the exhibit brings together. This is especially the case for those who may not be well informed of the events of 1898 or the various spaces and peoples they involved. While the exhibit may provoke some to further study, it also risks, for others, the conflation of the disparate histories of distinct peoples. Moreover, while the exhibit highlights the worlds of Hawai’i, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Cuba in its telling of the story of US empire, it curiously absents Spain, a central actor in the Wars of 1898. Notwithstanding a broadside with portraits of Spanish military and political leaders and a scenic painting by Cuban painter Armando Menocal that depicts the figure of a Spanish soldier, for example, Spain is otherwise a ghostly presence in the exhibition. Its revision of US imperial power is absent. This absence risks overlooking the historic relationships between Spain and its former colonies (both before and even after 1898) and the ways in which the US relied heavily on existing Spanish colonial structures, laws, and practices in governing its new Caribbean and Pacific possessions. On the one hand, it begs the question how a section dedicated to Spain might enrich the exhibit’s critical revisioning of 1898. On the other, given the weight of the “desastre del 98” in Spain’s national historical memory, it provokes us to query what such an exhibition might look like in Spain should one of its own national institutions mount a similar exhibition that critically reflects on its imperial past and its ongoing legacies.

That said, the exhibit excels at fostering timely global conversations between works, artists, cultures, histories, spaces, and peoples within and across geopolitical borders. By bringing together an impressively diverse collection of works and objects that have seldom been seen outside national or colonial exhibition halls, archives, or private collections, the exhibit begins this important work and calls for the need to continue these critical conversations about empire(s) and its afterlives.