Professor Jessica L. Horton is a scholar of modern and contemporary art, specializing in Native American politics, globalization, and environmental justice. Her courses span global contemporary, American, and Indigenous topics, with a focus on the transnational and transcultural movement of people, objects, and ideas. Her book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (Duke University Press, June 2017), was supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Art History Publication Initiative and a Wyeth Foundation for American Art publication grant. She was recently awarded a Clark Art Institute Fellowship, a Andy Warhol Foundation Book Award, and a Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Academic Fellowship in American Modernism for her book-in-progress, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973, which charts the revitalization of Indigenous ecology and diplomacy through Cold War arts initiatives. A third project, Ecolonial Holism, centers Indigenous creative practitioners in an expanded genealogy of ecological art and thought from the final years of Indian Removal to the recent Idle No More and No Dakota Access Pipeline movements. She is an affiliate of the Delaware Environmental Institute and the Center for Material Culture Studies.
Professor Horton earned a M.A. and Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester and a B.A. in Art History and Political Science at the University of California, San Diego. Her research has been supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities/Getty Research Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Smithsonian American Art Museum/National Museum of the American Indian Postdoctoral Fellowship, a Wyeth Fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, a Social Science Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, and a Terra Foundation for American Art Summer Residency in Giverny, among other awards.
Selected Publications
Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement (Duke University Press, June 2017).
“Ecolonial Holism,” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 5, no. 1 (Summer 2019), “Ecocriticism” Bully Pulpit, ed. Karl Kusserow, editions.lib.umn.edu/panorama/article/ecocriticism/ecolonial-holism/.
“Performing Paint, Claiming Space: The Santa Fe Indian School Posters on Paul Coze’s Stage in Paris, 1935,” Transatlantica: Revue d’études américaines 2 (2019), special issue, “Dialoguing the American West in France,” eds. Emily Burns and Agathe Cabau, https://journals.openedition.org/transatlantica/11220.
“‘All Our Relations’ as an Eco-Art Historical Challenge: Lessons from Standing Bear’s Muslin,” in Ecologies, Agents, Terrains, eds. Christopher Heuer and Rebecca Zorach (Clark Art Institute and Yale University Press, 2018), 73–93.
“Indigenous Artists Against the Anthropocene,” Art Journal 76:2 (Summer 2017).
“Plural Diplomacies Between Indian Termination and the Cold War: Contemporary American Indian Paintings in the ‘Near East’, 1964–1966,” Journal of Curatorial Studies, special issue, The Art of Cultural Diplomacy (Spring 2017).
“Jimmie Durham’s Stones and Bones,” in Jimmie Durham: At the Center of the World, ed. Anne Ellegood (The Hammer Museum & DelMonico Books/Prestel, 2017): 78-85.
“Ojibwa Tableaux Vivants: George Catlin, Robert Houle, and Transcultural Materialism,” Art History 39:1 (Feb. 2016): 124-151.
“A ‘Cloudburst’ in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S. Pavilion of 1932,” American Art, 29:1 (March 2015): 54–81.
“Art History’s Tangled Legs,” in Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, ed. Kathleen Ash-Milby (Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, 2015), 145-148.
“Painter/Traveler/Diplomat,” in Fritz Scholder: Super Indian, 1967–1980, John Lukavic, Jessica Horton, and Eric Berkemeyer (Denver Art Museum & Prestel, 2015), 41–53.
(and Janet Catherine Berlo), “Pueblo Painting in 1932: Folding Narratives of Native Art into American Art History,” in The Companion to American Art History, eds. Jennifer Greenhill, John Davis, and Jason LaFountain (Wiley-Blackwell, 2015), 264-280.
(and Cherise Smith), “The Particulars of Postidentity,” eds. Jessica L. Horton and Cherise Smith, American Art, 28:1 (Spring 2014): 2–8.
(and Janet Berlo), “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” Third Text, special issue, Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology, ed. T. J. Demos, 27:1 (January 2013): 17–28.
“Of Mimicry and Drag: Homi Bhabha and Kent Monkman,” in Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Routledge, 2013), 169–191.
“Alone on the Snow, Alone on the Beach: ‘A Global Sense of Place’ in Atanarjuat and Fountain,” Journal for Transnational American Studies, special forum, Charting Transnational Native American Studies, eds. Philip J. Deloria, et al., 4:1 (June 2012): 1–25.
“A Shore Without a Horizon: Locating as Looking Anew,” Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art (Peabody Essex Museum & Yale University Press, 2012), 50–63.
“Textured Stories: Three California Baskets,” American Indian Art from the Thaw Collection (Fenimore Art Museum, 2010), 102–109.