Jessica L Horton
Jessica L. Horton is an associate professor of modern, contemporary, and Native North American art at the University of Delaware. Her scholarship and teaching center Native artists in a global story of modernity, following the transnational and transcultural movement of people, art, and ideas. Horton has published widely on the relationship between Indigenous knowledge and critical theories of ecology, materiality, globalization, and diplomacy.
Horton's first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, published by Duke University Press in 2017 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, illuminates the impact of spatialized Indigenous struggles for justice on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her second book, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in summer of 2024. Winner of a Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Fellowship in American Modernism, a Creative Capital Arts Writers Book Grant, a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, and a Wyeth Foundation publication award, the book examines how artists revitalized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth at the center of Cold War international relations.
Horton is currently working on a new monograph, Fire Oppression: Burning and Weaving in Indigenous California, as well as a collaboration with Pomo weavers to research and digitize cultural and ecological knowledge held in turn-of-the-twentieth century basket collections in east coast museums. Her recent essays contribute to an expanded intellectual genealogy of ecocriticism centered on Native American thinkers and makers from the colonization of California to the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement.
Horton has received fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, Getty Research Institute, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and popular venues, including American Art, Art History, Art in America, Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Panorama, Third Text, Transmotion, and The Brookyn Rail. In her spare time, Horton is completing an earth-sheltered, solar-powered, fire-resistant house with her family in the coastal hills of northern California.
Horton's first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, published by Duke University Press in 2017 with support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, illuminates the impact of spatialized Indigenous struggles for justice on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her second book, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in summer of 2024. Winner of a Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Fellowship in American Modernism, a Creative Capital Arts Writers Book Grant, a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, and a Wyeth Foundation publication award, the book examines how artists revitalized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth at the center of Cold War international relations.
Horton is currently working on a new monograph, Fire Oppression: Burning and Weaving in Indigenous California, as well as a collaboration with Pomo weavers to research and digitize cultural and ecological knowledge held in turn-of-the-twentieth century basket collections in east coast museums. Her recent essays contribute to an expanded intellectual genealogy of ecocriticism centered on Native American thinkers and makers from the colonization of California to the No Dakota Access Pipeline movement.
Horton has received fellowships from the Clark Art Institute, Getty Research Institute, Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, Smithsonian Institution, the Social Science Research Council, and the Terra Foundation for American Art, among others. Her essays have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and popular venues, including American Art, Art History, Art in America, Art Journal, The Art Bulletin, Journal of Transnational American Studies, Panorama, Third Text, Transmotion, and The Brookyn Rail. In her spare time, Horton is completing an earth-sheltered, solar-powered, fire-resistant house with her family in the coastal hills of northern California.
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Published Books, Essays, and Reviews by Jessica L Horton
In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the midtwentieth-century mobilized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth itself at the center of international relations. She focuses on a group of artists including Pablita Velarde, Darryl Blackman, and Oscar Howe who participated in exhibitions and lectures abroad as part of the United States's Cold War cultural propaganda. Horton emphasizes how their art modeled a radical alternative to dominant forms of statecraft, a practice she calls "earth diplomacy:" a response to extractive colonial capitalism grounded in Native ideas of deep reciprocal relationships between humans and other beings that govern the world. Horton draws on extensive archival research and oral histories as well as analyses of Indigenous creative work including paintings, textiles, tipis, adornment, and artistic demonstrations. By interweaving diplomacy, ecology, and art history, Horton advances Indigenous frameworks of reciprocity with all beings in the cosmos as a path to transforming our broken system of global politics.
"Jessica L. Horton persuasively shows how the lectures, teaching, performances, and works of Native American artists can be seen as a continuation of deep traditions of 'earth diplomacy' through which Indigenous peoples have long affirmed the reciprocal relationships between the humans and nonhumans. Designed to maintain and restore harmony and peace, these political and spiritual practices through art constitute diplomacy in its most essential sense. Horton's highly original intervention is particularly powerful in the present moment, as we grapple with environmental collapse."
-Ruth B. Phillips, author of Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums
for the long-standing collision and entanglement of the Indigenous and
Euro-American fire regimes explored in this essay. Specifically, I
consider how baskets handwoven by Native women from two distinct,
flame-sculpted regions index the shifting political ecology of fire in
California. My account concentrates on Chumash territory on the
southern coast, where Spaniards first prohibited Indigenous fire-setting
in 1793, and concludes in Yurok territory in the northern Klamath River
Basin, where cultural burning and weaving are undergoing an
entwined revitalization. Woven vessels are the foundation of
customary Indigenous cultures in California, notably women’s landcare
practices that entail the application of fire. Robin Wall Kimmerer
and Frank Kanawha Lake assert that across North America, “the ethic
of reciprocal responsibility underlies the indigenous use of fire, an
adaptive symbiosis in which humans and nonhumans both benefit
from burning.” People and plants are seen as coequals, codependents,
and even cocreators, woven together by pragmatic and spiritual
threads. Baskets embody this multifaceted, mutually constitutive
relationship. Woven from roots, stems, feathers, and shells,
they assemble more-than-human collectives. Together, they catalog the radical transformations of colonialism on the habitat and habitus of Native Californians—a process that I argue is driven by conflicting fire imaginaries that differentially define relationships between humans and land.
From 1964 to 1966, the United States Information Agency toured an exhibition of modern artworks titled Contemporary American Indian Paintings to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Israel. Among other exhibitions of Native American art sent abroad during the Cold War, the paintings were intended to counter Soviet critiques of US colonization with a message of benevolent modernization, while deflecting international attention away from Indigenous decolonization struggles. This article positions the tour between federal Indian termination policy and Cold War propaganda, considering how Contemporary American Indian Paintings quietly slipped Native American diplomatic concerns into a global arena shaped by imperialism.
In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.
‘living pictures’ for audiences in Paris. In 2010, Saulteaux artist, curator, and critic
Robert Houle (b. 1947) created Paris/Ojibwa, an archive, salon, and stage set in which
paintings of the past Ojibwa appear poised to perform again. Crossing the historical
distance between 1846 and 2010, as well as the ontological distinction typically
drawn between live bodies and static pictures, Houle’s installation prompts timely
questions about the ‘new materialisms’ that have lately preoccupied scholars across
disciplines. Is the currently popular notion that material entities share liveliness
and agency with humans really so ‘new’? What happens to the European ‘we’ in
a favourite title of this trend, Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, when the
perspectives of indigenous people in Paris are taken into account? As I will elaborate,
the transcultural phenomenon of Ojibwa tableaux vivants demands a materialist
framework bigger than the ‘new’ and the ‘we.’
In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the midtwentieth-century mobilized Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth itself at the center of international relations. She focuses on a group of artists including Pablita Velarde, Darryl Blackman, and Oscar Howe who participated in exhibitions and lectures abroad as part of the United States's Cold War cultural propaganda. Horton emphasizes how their art modeled a radical alternative to dominant forms of statecraft, a practice she calls "earth diplomacy:" a response to extractive colonial capitalism grounded in Native ideas of deep reciprocal relationships between humans and other beings that govern the world. Horton draws on extensive archival research and oral histories as well as analyses of Indigenous creative work including paintings, textiles, tipis, adornment, and artistic demonstrations. By interweaving diplomacy, ecology, and art history, Horton advances Indigenous frameworks of reciprocity with all beings in the cosmos as a path to transforming our broken system of global politics.
"Jessica L. Horton persuasively shows how the lectures, teaching, performances, and works of Native American artists can be seen as a continuation of deep traditions of 'earth diplomacy' through which Indigenous peoples have long affirmed the reciprocal relationships between the humans and nonhumans. Designed to maintain and restore harmony and peace, these political and spiritual practices through art constitute diplomacy in its most essential sense. Horton's highly original intervention is particularly powerful in the present moment, as we grapple with environmental collapse."
-Ruth B. Phillips, author of Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums
for the long-standing collision and entanglement of the Indigenous and
Euro-American fire regimes explored in this essay. Specifically, I
consider how baskets handwoven by Native women from two distinct,
flame-sculpted regions index the shifting political ecology of fire in
California. My account concentrates on Chumash territory on the
southern coast, where Spaniards first prohibited Indigenous fire-setting
in 1793, and concludes in Yurok territory in the northern Klamath River
Basin, where cultural burning and weaving are undergoing an
entwined revitalization. Woven vessels are the foundation of
customary Indigenous cultures in California, notably women’s landcare
practices that entail the application of fire. Robin Wall Kimmerer
and Frank Kanawha Lake assert that across North America, “the ethic
of reciprocal responsibility underlies the indigenous use of fire, an
adaptive symbiosis in which humans and nonhumans both benefit
from burning.” People and plants are seen as coequals, codependents,
and even cocreators, woven together by pragmatic and spiritual
threads. Baskets embody this multifaceted, mutually constitutive
relationship. Woven from roots, stems, feathers, and shells,
they assemble more-than-human collectives. Together, they catalog the radical transformations of colonialism on the habitat and habitus of Native Californians—a process that I argue is driven by conflicting fire imaginaries that differentially define relationships between humans and land.
From 1964 to 1966, the United States Information Agency toured an exhibition of modern artworks titled Contemporary American Indian Paintings to Greece, Turkey, Iran, Algeria and Israel. Among other exhibitions of Native American art sent abroad during the Cold War, the paintings were intended to counter Soviet critiques of US colonization with a message of benevolent modernization, while deflecting international attention away from Indigenous decolonization struggles. This article positions the tour between federal Indian termination policy and Cold War propaganda, considering how Contemporary American Indian Paintings quietly slipped Native American diplomatic concerns into a global arena shaped by imperialism.
In Art for an Undivided Earth Jessica L. Horton reveals how the spatial philosophies underlying the American Indian Movement (AIM) were refigured by a generation of artists searching for new places to stand. Upending the assumption that Jimmie Durham, James Luna, Kay WalkingStick, Robert Houle, and others were primarily concerned with identity politics, she joins them in remapping the coordinates of a widely shared yet deeply contested modernity that is defined in great part by the colonization of the Americas. She follows their installations, performances, and paintings across the ocean and back in time, as they retrace the paths of Native diplomats, scholars, performers, and objects in Europe after 1492. Along the way, Horton intervenes in a range of theories about global modernisms, Native American sovereignty, racial difference, archival logic, artistic itinerancy, and new materialisms. Writing in creative dialogue with contemporary artists, she builds a picture of a spatially, temporally, and materially interconnected world—an undivided earth.
‘living pictures’ for audiences in Paris. In 2010, Saulteaux artist, curator, and critic
Robert Houle (b. 1947) created Paris/Ojibwa, an archive, salon, and stage set in which
paintings of the past Ojibwa appear poised to perform again. Crossing the historical
distance between 1846 and 2010, as well as the ontological distinction typically
drawn between live bodies and static pictures, Houle’s installation prompts timely
questions about the ‘new materialisms’ that have lately preoccupied scholars across
disciplines. Is the currently popular notion that material entities share liveliness
and agency with humans really so ‘new’? What happens to the European ‘we’ in
a favourite title of this trend, Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, when the
perspectives of indigenous people in Paris are taken into account? As I will elaborate,
the transcultural phenomenon of Ojibwa tableaux vivants demands a materialist
framework bigger than the ‘new’ and the ‘we.’