Introduction

We examine links between art and foreign policy through two important instances of cultural diplomacy in Australia’s history. Each time – in 1941-2 and in 2009 - the government staged an extensive exhibition in the US. Each time the exhibition displayed Indigenous art with the explicit purpose of increasing Australia’s political legitimacy and influence. But in each case the artworks in question resisted and subverted this form of diplomatic instrumentalization. Art managed to insert and communicate political claims that highlighted – against governmental intentions and policies at the time - the suppression of Indigenous rights and demands for sovereignty. In doing so art challenged not just legal and political norms, but an entire verbal and visual narrative of nation building that emerged out of colonialism. Art thus became political in the most fundamental way, for it directly interfered with what Jacques Rancière called the distribution of the sensible: the boundaries of what is visible and invisible, thinkable and unthinkable and thus of what can and cannot be debated in politics.

American Art, 2022

*American Art has unfortunately requested removal of the pdf of this essay, so please email me if you don't have free institutional access.* This essay offers a reading of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian as a diplomatic assemblage, centered on the exhibition Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (2014–25). I elaborate on the political geographer Jason Dittmer’s theory of the diplomatic assemblage, which holds that material circulations shape international relations through a surplus emotional charge that can shift political cognition. Throughout Nation to Nation, Indigenous diplomatic arts such as wampum advance geopolitical frameworks premised on kinship and reciprocity with all aspects of a living cosmos. I argue that these arts activate a latent potential for the museum to function as a diplomatic agent in Native nations’ ongoing negotiations with the United States, despite centuries of betrayal. I also consider how the diplomatic assemblage can inform a broader interpretive ethics in the field of Native North American art.

Green Diplomacy, 2023

After decades of Indigenous diplomacy efforts at the UN concerning the concept of "Mother Earth-Nature", there has been a growing recognition of the Rights of Nature (RoN). In an article drawing upon findings from interviews with Indigenous delegates, UN officers and NGO representatives, the RIVERS project examines the contradictions that RoN activism could have in terms of respecting Indigenous Peoples' rights. Indigenous diplomacy at the United Nations has its symbolic origin in 1923 with the visit of Deskaheh Levi General to the incipient League of Nations in Geneva. Although Deskaheh Levi, in his role as the spokesperson of the Haudenousanee peoples (Canada-USA), was not received by the states gathered in Geneva, the then Mayor of the city Mr. Jean-Baptiste Pons extended an invitation to him to deliver his message to the local society. A hundred years later, in July 2023 the current Deskaheh Steve Jacobs, a Haudenousanee delegation and the Mayor of Geneva Alfonso Gomez met in an official reception at Palais Anna and Jean-Gabriel Eynard on the occasion of the centenary of the first encounter. Historical Indigenous diplomacy for taking care of Mother Earth and the Rights of Nature-Green ... https://www.greendiplomacy.org/article/historical-indigenous-diplomacy-for-taking-care-of-mother-e...

Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation, 2017

This is the introduction to my book, available from Duke University Press. To order at a 30% discount please visit https://www.dukeupress.edu/art-for-an-undivided-earth and enter the coupon code E17HORTN during checkout 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.

This thesis explores the possible ways in which Pacific indigenous art on climate change can be conceptualized in IR. In answering this question, this study also identifies the analytical potential of the so-called Aesthetic Turn in International Relations. In order to do so, this thesis defines two potential ways in which this genre of art can be interpreted. Firstly, the suggestion is made that there is a potential for interpretation of these artworks with concepts borrowed from postcolonial and indigenous theories, such as counterhegemony, decolonization and identity-creation. Secondly, this research identifies that because the artworks address an issue of security, namely climate change, borrowing concepts from securitization theory or the field of Security Studies can be helpful. This thesis analyzes five Pacific indigenous artworks on climate change from various artforms by using the concepts of decolonization, counterhegemony, identity-creation, securitization, environmental security, human security and state sovereignty. This thesis also contributes to the current state of the debate in the Aesthetic Turn in International Relations, by identifying that there is potential for viewing art as part of the realm of politics. This potential lies in exploring non-traditional sectors in security and in working more closely with disciplines that focus on a specific artform or on a specific context.

Curatorial Studies, 2017

*For a special issue on “The Art of Cultural Diplomacy.” 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.

Manifestations: New Native Art Criticism, 2011

Ecologies, Agents, Terrains (Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press), 2018

This essay centers on a muslin painting of the Battle of the Little Bighorn completed by the Minneconjou Lakota man Standing Bear in 1899. I consider how this powerful object transmitted Lakota principles of interconnectedness indicated by the prayerful phrases, "all our relations" and "water is life," between nineteenth-century Indian Removal and the movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline at Standing Rock in 2016. EXCERPT: How might the ecological webs we spin incorporate, rather than obfuscate, violent dislocations that connect past and present? What kind of “eco–art history” might we compose to confront, critique, and cross traumatic divisions engendered by settler colonialism, a process out of which our discipline was forged and with which it remains entangled? Such questions bind ethical activism to a scholarly praxis attentive to Indigenous and environmental justice in the twenty-first century. They also prompt a deeper engagement with past materials as a crucial means of transmission, as I will explore in relation to an artwork created by the Minneconjou Lakota man Standing Bear at the turn of the twentieth century.

American Indian Quarterly, 2011