Jessica Horton
Jessica L. Horton
Native American, Modern, and Contemporary Art
Biography
Professor Jessica L. Horton is a scholar of modern and contemporary Native North American art. Her research and teaching center Indigenous artists in a global story of modernity, following the transcultural movement of people, art, and ideas. Professor Horton has published widely on the relationships connecting Indigenous knowledge, creative practice, and theories of ecology, diplomacy, and globalization. She encourages hands-on collaboration in her classes, such as working with students and Indigenous communities to curate exhibitions of Native American art on campus.
Professor Horton's first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (2017) illuminates the impact of Indigenous struggles for land and life on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her second book, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War (2024), examines how artists revitalized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth at the center of our broken system of international relations. Professor Horton is currently working on a new project, Fire Oppression: Burning and Weaving in Indigenous California, in conversation with Native weavers and fire managers across the state of California.
Professor Horton's research has received support from the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, the Clark Art Institute, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and Research Center, a Creative Capital Arts Writers Book Grant, two Wyeth Foundation Publication Grants, and more. She is a passionate member of the American Indian and Indigenous Relations Committee of the University of Delaware Antiracism Initiative. In her spare time, she is working on an earth-sheltered, solar-powered, fire-resistant house with her family in the coastal hills of northern California.
Selected Publications
Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War (Duke University Press, Aug. 2024).
Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (Duke University Press, June 2017).
“Reading Settler Archives Relationally," Archives of American Art Journal 63, no. 1 (Spring 2024): 76–83.
“Coiled Baskets, Spiraled Futures," The Brooklyn Rail, The Irving Sandler Essay, edited by Alexander Nagel (Dec./Jan. 2023/2024): 50–56.
and Christine Howard Sandoval, “'Genocide is Climate Change'": A Conversation about Colonized California and Indigenous Futures," World Art 13, no. 3, special issue, Art and Environmentalism, eds. Renato Rodrigues da Silva and Tami Bogéa (March 2023): 1–18.
