Biotic Media and Ocean Worlds
Maggie M. Cao
Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The term “sepia” usually describes a warm, brown color, but few know that this artistic usage is taken from the animal world, where Sepia refers to a genus of cuttlefish—a nod to the long history of extracting melanin fluid from cephalopods for drawing and writing. This talk uses cuttlefish ink as a vehicle for rethinking human-ocean relations in the mid nineteenth century, tracing flows between novelist Victor Hugo’s maritime drawings made in the Channel Islands to paleontological discoveries and scientific illustrations on nearby coastlines. Experiments with biotic media, the talk argues, were efforts to conceptualize the nonhuman environment of the ocean.
Maggie M. Cao is Professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her scholarship interrogates the history of globalization in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century United States. She often writes about visual and material culture in relation to histories of technology, natural science, and economics. Cao received her PhD from Harvard University in 2014 and has since held fellowships at the Columbia Society of Fellows, the Getty Research Institute, and the National Humanities Center, among other institutions. She is an award-winning author of two books, The End of Landscape in Nineteenth-Century America (2018) and Painting US Empire: Nineteenth-Century Art and its Legacies (2025), which received the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Eldredge Prize in 2026. Cao has also published numerous articles on wide-ranging topics including ecocriticism, media theory, export art, financial bubbles, and contemporary pop culture for both scholarly and public audiences. Since 2025, she has been a co-editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Grey Room. She is currently developing new projects on art and ecological time and the visual culture of the oceans.
Lecture followed by reception.
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Sponsored by the Jacobs/Mitnick American Art Fund.