A New World Imagined proposes a bold new look at the art of the Americas by viewing it through its intersections with the world at large. Taking the vast geography and cultural diversity of the North and South American continents as its starting point, the book introduces the ways in which American art, broadly defined, has been shaped both by its encounters with cultures around the globe and by its own past---from the ancient and Native populations who first inhabited these territories to the European, Asian, Scandinavian, and Latino emigres who settled here. But beyond actual immigration, foreign cultures---especially those of Asia and the Islamic world---have also impacted our own in purely imaginary ways, as American artists projected their fantasies and preconceptions on these far-off lands and imported their motifs, inventing a hybridized, and very American, vision of the "other". Discussing over two hundred artworks, from incense burners and drinking vessels to some of this nation's most celebrated paintings and sculptures, A New World Imagined offers an alternate history of the Americas through the diversity of sources with which its art has been fashioned.