Spain and America have long used international exhibitions to create, promote, modify, and contest national identity. In this book, M. Elizabeth Boone investigates a series of Spanish exhibitions, with particular emphasis on the 1876, 1893, and 1915 expositions in the United States, the 1888 and 1889 fairs in Barcelona and Paris, and the 1910 celebrations of independence in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, and Santiago de Chile. Studying the paintings, ephemeral architectural spaces, and manifold manifestations of visual culture, Boone brings attention to the rich and understudied history of Spanish artistic production in the trans-Atlantic world. At the same time, she uncovers the “Spanishness” of U.S. national identity and explores the means by which Americans from Santiago de Chile to Chicago or San Diego, California, used exhibitions of Spanish art and history to mold their own modern self-image.

M. Elizabeth Boone is Professor of the History of Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Alberta in Canada. She specializes in nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in the United States, Spain, and Latin America and has recently turned her attention to the exhibition of animals at fairs and expositions in Europe and America.