Jessica L Horton | University of Delaware (original) (raw)

Published Books, Essays, and Reviews by Jessica L Horton

Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War, 2024

In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth centur... more In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth 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.

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dukeupress.edu/earth-diplomacy August 2024 | 392 pages, 97 illustrations, including 16 page color... more dukeupress.edu/earth-diplomacy August 2024 | 392 pages, 97 illustrations, including 16 page color insert 978-1-4780-3049-2 | 30.95paperback30.95 paperback 30.95paperback21.67 with discount Special offer: Use coupon code E24HRTON to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu.

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

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World Art, 2023

This written conversation unpacks a phrase, "genocide is climate change," which co-author Christi... more This written conversation unpacks a phrase, "genocide is climate change," which co-author Christine Howard Sandoval wrote and featured in her video artwork, Niniwas - to belong here (2022). The authors discuss scholarship linking the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to climate change and contextualize the assertion within an expanded archive of the Spanish missions in California. They address Howard Sandoval's multimedia work in dialogue with Indigenous women's basket weaving and land care practices, including the cultural use of fire, in order to consider how Indigenous arts can illuminate the intertwined apocalypses of colonization and climate change.

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Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, 2022

Eight precisely rendered canoes glide across the surface of The Great Visit (2007), a drypoint pr... more Eight precisely rendered canoes glide across the surface of The Great Visit (2007), a drypoint print by Alanis Obomsawin. Each carries human, animal, and hybrid beings to a "gathering to celebrate the passage of the light," an event signalled by the immersive orange glow of the paper. The interspecies and intermedial elements brought together in The Great Visit guide my own idiosyncratic gathering of the artist's prints and films--along with the disparate material culture, makers, other-than-human beings, and audiences they host--in the course of this essay. I explore how the sensuous modes of fabrication that connect Obomsawin's lifework generate specific perceptual and ethical appeals, implicating us in the transmission of embodied knowledges critical to adapting Indigenous political ecologies on a colonized earth.

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American Art, 2022

*American Art has unfortunately requested removal of the pdf of this essay, so please email me if... more *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.

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The Art Bulletin, 2022

From 1966 to 1968 the United States government commissioned Diné artist Fred Stevens to demonstra... more From 1966 to 1968 the United States government commissioned Diné artist Fred Stevens to demonstrate sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, in accordance with a prevailing logic of a “balance of power” in international relations. Stevens’s translations of ephemeral ceremonies worked against the grain, palpably connecting Diné efforts to protect Navajo Nation lands from military-industrial incursions to the acceleration of sand mining to feed a global building boom. Stevens’s demonstrations and gifts serve as exemplars of earth diplomacy, a practice of engendering sensuous material exchanges to facilitate reciprocity among disparate human communities and the lands that sustain them.

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Humans: Terra Foundation Essays Volume 5, 2021

Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground for the long-standing collision and... more Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground
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.

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The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment, 2021

In this essay I treat the "American" desert as a generative site for Indigenous futurist projects... more In this essay I treat the "American" desert as a generative site for Indigenous futurist projects that illuminate and respond to a shifting visual culture of desertification, "a process whereby fertile lands turn into barren land or desert." Since the nineteenth century, iconic images of stone sentinels and arid expanses have joined with other techniques of colonial violence to empty fertile land of its living claimants and make way for resource extraction. These imaginaries, which deny Indigenous and biotic inhabitants a future, are manipulated to regenerative ends in AIR (Auto-Immune Response), an ongoing series of installations by the Diné (Navajo) artist Will Wilson. My dual aim is to sketch a deadly genealogy of desert pictures in the Indigenous Southwest and to identify, through a close reading of AIR, the persistent fissures where creative, nonnormative futures may thrive.

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The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, 2021

"Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a multimedia artist, creative writer, and citizen of Santa Clara Pueb... more "Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a multimedia artist, creative writer, and citizen of Santa Clara Pueblo, shared her words and experiences with me to generate this conversational essay. Rose holds a BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and a MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied for three years in the Automotive Science Program at Northern New Mexico College, and is currently enrolled in the Low Rez Creative Writing MFA program at IAIA. Behind these institutional markers lies a more fundamental education that has shaped Rose's creative formulation of a climate-changed futurism: Her upbringing at Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, co-founded by her mother, sculptor and architect Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962), at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1987. This collaboration begins with an intimate narrative by Rose, then opens into a conversation about ancestral Indigenous lifeways, the decolonial politics of permaculture and "climate grief," the spiritual and ecological resonances of leather, clay, and metal, and the role of post-apocalyptic theory in her work."

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Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art , 2019

Response featured in “Ecocriticism” Bully Pulpit, ed. Karl Kusserow

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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 Minn... more 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.

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Art Journal, 2017

[Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Mo... more [Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Movement and No Dakota Access Pipeline to consider tensions and resonances between the work of select Indigenous practitioners and broader developments in art and ecology. Some of the groundwork is laid in a previous article I coauthored with Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” for a special issue of Third Text on contemporary art and the politics of ecology, edited by Demos in 2013, as well as my recently published book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Some of the same artists and insights from that research reappear here.This essay differs in its aim to build a genealogy of ecocritical concerns connecting philosophy and activism during AIM in the 1970s, so-called identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, and creative media in the context of Anthropocene discourses after 2000. Putting “Native struggles for land and life” in dialogue with contemporary ecoaesthetics—or more specifically, considering their intersections in a continuum of First Nations texts and artworks—bears on some of the most pressing problems in both fields. A historically informed engagement with the political status of Native American lands can yield a fuller understanding of the interdependencies among colonialism, capitalism, and ecological devastation. More profoundly, the related arts have played a critical role in transmitting alternative means of organizing human-earth relations through a painful history to address our equally fraught present.

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The conflict zone of the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement was shaped by military-indus... more The conflict zone of the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement was shaped by military-industrial technologies that connect the surface of the earth to the atmosphere. This essay examines the use of drone footage in the work of the Winter Count Collective and discusses an array of new media works that use Indigenous storytelling devices and digital technologies to address environmental crisis.

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Transatlantica (special issue: Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France), 2019

This essay examines sixty-one extant posters that were hand-painted by students at the Studio Sch... more This essay examines sixty-one extant posters that were hand-painted by students at the Studio School of the Santa Fe Indian School and sent to Paris to advertise an exhibition of their artwork, Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui (Redskin Art Today), at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1935. It features primary research leading to the first publication of some of the earliest known works by Oscar Howe, Allan Houser, and other famous and lesser-known artists who studied under Dorothy Dunn in the 1930s, while placing these artists in dialogue with performers such as Molly Spotted Elk and Oskomon, who lived and worked in Paris. A collaboration between the students and Paul Coze, a French hobbyist and self-trained ethnographer, the commission was a dynamic component of a transatlantic assemblage that included Native objects and performers in Paris. Framed by printed French text, the figures that populated the posters engaged playfully with the city’s streets, museums, and stages, demonstrating the mutual porousness of graphic and performing arts. Horton argues that although the students could not travel in the flesh, they claimed a space for Indigenous cultural values and experiences of modernity in the French capital.

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Curatorial Studies, 2017

*For a special issue on “The Art of Cultural Diplomacy.” From 1964 to 1966, the United States I... more *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.

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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% disc... more 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.

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Third Text, Jan 2013

Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour ... more Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour of theorizing the agency and liveliness of matter. The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite dialogue among a wider host of agents, raising the possibility of an ethics that binds humans to the material entities upon which our livelihoods depend. However, any vision of global environmental justice is incomplete without engaging longstanding indigenous philosophies of materiality. The authors devote the first portion of this essay to an analysis of why it has been difficult for the ‘new materialisms’ to incorporate indigenous intellectual traditions into discussions of non-human agency, focusing on contemporary arts discourse. They then turn to a discussion of recent works by Native North American artists Jimmie Durham, Rebecca Belmore, Will Wilson and Jolene Rickard, which incorporate indigenous understandings of material with an acute awareness of the contemporary, global challenges of co-habitation.

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American Art, 2014

At first glance, “postidentity” relegates identity concerns to history and signals a level playin... more At first glance, “postidentity” relegates identity concerns to history and signals a level playing field for artists from diverse backgrounds working today. Yet when one compares post-black, post-Chicano, post-Indian, and other “posts,” their tensions become clear. Each phrase signals a specific history that includes discrimination, political struggles, and changing cultural forms. Each situates the present in relation to the past of the group it names, generating a subtler range of meanings than the generic term “postidentity” allows. Countering the discourse’s tendency toward abstraction, we ask when, how, and for whom the particulars matter.

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Art History, Feb 2016

In 1846, thirteen Ojibwa men, women, and children performed tableaux vivants or ‘living pictures’... more In 1846, thirteen Ojibwa men, women, and children performed tableaux vivants or
‘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.’

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American Art, Mar 2015

This essay reevaluates the early paintings of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (ca. 1900–1986) in light o... more This essay reevaluates the early paintings of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (ca. 1900–1986) in light of their forgotten inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1932. Kabotie painted images of ceremonial dances alongside Pueblo peers in Santa Fe in the 1910s, at the height of federal assimilation policies. American patrons supported the painters as a means of constructing an indigenous artistic identity for the nation. But the display of Pueblo paintings in Venice marked the limits of aesthetic nationalism, failing to convince overseas audiences that America possessed an artistic treasury older and more authentic than that of Europe. The author recovers Kabotie’s broader engagement with issues of displacement, memory, and embodiment. She proposes that the paintings share a visual logic with musical notation and other diagrams, transmitting the sensibility of Hopi dances across gaps in time and space. They resonate with the politics of memory in recent work by Native artists at the Venice Biennale.

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Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art, Ecological Crisis, and the Cold War, 2024

In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth centur... more In Earth Diplomacy, Jessica L. Horton reveals how Native American art in the mid-twentieth 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.

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dukeupress.edu/earth-diplomacy August 2024 | 392 pages, 97 illustrations, including 16 page color... more dukeupress.edu/earth-diplomacy August 2024 | 392 pages, 97 illustrations, including 16 page color insert 978-1-4780-3049-2 | 30.95paperback30.95 paperback 30.95paperback21.67 with discount Special offer: Use coupon code E24HRTON to save 30% when you order from dukeupress.edu.

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

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World Art, 2023

This written conversation unpacks a phrase, "genocide is climate change," which co-author Christi... more This written conversation unpacks a phrase, "genocide is climate change," which co-author Christine Howard Sandoval wrote and featured in her video artwork, Niniwas - to belong here (2022). The authors discuss scholarship linking the genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas to climate change and contextualize the assertion within an expanded archive of the Spanish missions in California. They address Howard Sandoval's multimedia work in dialogue with Indigenous women's basket weaving and land care practices, including the cultural use of fire, in order to consider how Indigenous arts can illuminate the intertwined apocalypses of colonization and climate change.

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Alanis Obomsawin: Lifework, 2022

Eight precisely rendered canoes glide across the surface of The Great Visit (2007), a drypoint pr... more Eight precisely rendered canoes glide across the surface of The Great Visit (2007), a drypoint print by Alanis Obomsawin. Each carries human, animal, and hybrid beings to a "gathering to celebrate the passage of the light," an event signalled by the immersive orange glow of the paper. The interspecies and intermedial elements brought together in The Great Visit guide my own idiosyncratic gathering of the artist's prints and films--along with the disparate material culture, makers, other-than-human beings, and audiences they host--in the course of this essay. I explore how the sensuous modes of fabrication that connect Obomsawin's lifework generate specific perceptual and ethical appeals, implicating us in the transmission of embodied knowledges critical to adapting Indigenous political ecologies on a colonized earth.

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American Art, 2022

*American Art has unfortunately requested removal of the pdf of this essay, so please email me if... more *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.

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The Art Bulletin, 2022

From 1966 to 1968 the United States government commissioned Diné artist Fred Stevens to demonstra... more From 1966 to 1968 the United States government commissioned Diné artist Fred Stevens to demonstrate sandpainting across Eurasia and Latin America, in accordance with a prevailing logic of a “balance of power” in international relations. Stevens’s translations of ephemeral ceremonies worked against the grain, palpably connecting Diné efforts to protect Navajo Nation lands from military-industrial incursions to the acceleration of sand mining to feed a global building boom. Stevens’s demonstrations and gifts serve as exemplars of earth diplomacy, a practice of engendering sensuous material exchanges to facilitate reciprocity among disparate human communities and the lands that sustain them.

Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact

Humans: Terra Foundation Essays Volume 5, 2021

Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground for the long-standing collision and... more Climate-changed California is the contemporary staging ground
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.

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The Invention of the American Desert: Art, Land, and the Politics of Environment, 2021

In this essay I treat the "American" desert as a generative site for Indigenous futurist projects... more In this essay I treat the "American" desert as a generative site for Indigenous futurist projects that illuminate and respond to a shifting visual culture of desertification, "a process whereby fertile lands turn into barren land or desert." Since the nineteenth century, iconic images of stone sentinels and arid expanses have joined with other techniques of colonial violence to empty fertile land of its living claimants and make way for resource extraction. These imaginaries, which deny Indigenous and biotic inhabitants a future, are manipulated to regenerative ends in AIR (Auto-Immune Response), an ongoing series of installations by the Diné (Navajo) artist Will Wilson. My dual aim is to sketch a deadly genealogy of desert pictures in the Indigenous Southwest and to identify, through a close reading of AIR, the persistent fissures where creative, nonnormative futures may thrive.

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The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, 2021

"Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a multimedia artist, creative writer, and citizen of Santa Clara Pueb... more "Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983), a multimedia artist, creative writer, and citizen of Santa Clara Pueblo, shared her words and experiences with me to generate this conversational essay. Rose holds a BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and a MFA in Ceramics from the Rhode Island School of Design, studied for three years in the Automotive Science Program at Northern New Mexico College, and is currently enrolled in the Low Rez Creative Writing MFA program at IAIA. Behind these institutional markers lies a more fundamental education that has shaped Rose's creative formulation of a climate-changed futurism: Her upbringing at Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, co-founded by her mother, sculptor and architect Roxanne Swentzell (b. 1962), at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1987. This collaboration begins with an intimate narrative by Rose, then opens into a conversation about ancestral Indigenous lifeways, the decolonial politics of permaculture and "climate grief," the spiritual and ecological resonances of leather, clay, and metal, and the role of post-apocalyptic theory in her work."

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Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art , 2019

Response featured in “Ecocriticism” Bully Pulpit, ed. Karl Kusserow

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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 Minn... more 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.

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Art Journal, 2017

[Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Mo... more [Excerpt] I briefly retrace a path of art and criticism in the decades between American Indian Movement and No Dakota Access Pipeline to consider tensions and resonances between the work of select Indigenous practitioners and broader developments in art and ecology. Some of the groundwork is laid in a previous article I coauthored with Janet Catherine Berlo, “Beyond the Mirror: Indigenous Ecologies and ‘New Materialisms’ in Contemporary Art,” for a special issue of Third Text on contemporary art and the politics of ecology, edited by Demos in 2013, as well as my recently published book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation. Some of the same artists and insights from that research reappear here.This essay differs in its aim to build a genealogy of ecocritical concerns connecting philosophy and activism during AIM in the 1970s, so-called identity art of the 1980s and 1990s, and creative media in the context of Anthropocene discourses after 2000. Putting “Native struggles for land and life” in dialogue with contemporary ecoaesthetics—or more specifically, considering their intersections in a continuum of First Nations texts and artworks—bears on some of the most pressing problems in both fields. A historically informed engagement with the political status of Native American lands can yield a fuller understanding of the interdependencies among colonialism, capitalism, and ecological devastation. More profoundly, the related arts have played a critical role in transmitting alternative means of organizing human-earth relations through a painful history to address our equally fraught present.

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The conflict zone of the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement was shaped by military-indus... more The conflict zone of the No Dakota Access Pipeline (NoDAPL) movement was shaped by military-industrial technologies that connect the surface of the earth to the atmosphere. This essay examines the use of drone footage in the work of the Winter Count Collective and discusses an array of new media works that use Indigenous storytelling devices and digital technologies to address environmental crisis.

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Transatlantica (special issue: Call and Answer: Dialoguing the American West in France), 2019

This essay examines sixty-one extant posters that were hand-painted by students at the Studio Sch... more This essay examines sixty-one extant posters that were hand-painted by students at the Studio School of the Santa Fe Indian School and sent to Paris to advertise an exhibition of their artwork, Art peau-rouge d’aujourd’hui (Redskin Art Today), at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1935. It features primary research leading to the first publication of some of the earliest known works by Oscar Howe, Allan Houser, and other famous and lesser-known artists who studied under Dorothy Dunn in the 1930s, while placing these artists in dialogue with performers such as Molly Spotted Elk and Oskomon, who lived and worked in Paris. A collaboration between the students and Paul Coze, a French hobbyist and self-trained ethnographer, the commission was a dynamic component of a transatlantic assemblage that included Native objects and performers in Paris. Framed by printed French text, the figures that populated the posters engaged playfully with the city’s streets, museums, and stages, demonstrating the mutual porousness of graphic and performing arts. Horton argues that although the students could not travel in the flesh, they claimed a space for Indigenous cultural values and experiences of modernity in the French capital.

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Curatorial Studies, 2017

*For a special issue on “The Art of Cultural Diplomacy.” From 1964 to 1966, the United States I... more *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.

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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% disc... more 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.

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Third Text, Jan 2013

Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour ... more Across disciplines, scholars are overturning objectivist approaches to the environment in favour of theorizing the agency and liveliness of matter. The ecological promise of these ‘new materialisms’ is to invite dialogue among a wider host of agents, raising the possibility of an ethics that binds humans to the material entities upon which our livelihoods depend. However, any vision of global environmental justice is incomplete without engaging longstanding indigenous philosophies of materiality. The authors devote the first portion of this essay to an analysis of why it has been difficult for the ‘new materialisms’ to incorporate indigenous intellectual traditions into discussions of non-human agency, focusing on contemporary arts discourse. They then turn to a discussion of recent works by Native North American artists Jimmie Durham, Rebecca Belmore, Will Wilson and Jolene Rickard, which incorporate indigenous understandings of material with an acute awareness of the contemporary, global challenges of co-habitation.

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American Art, 2014

At first glance, “postidentity” relegates identity concerns to history and signals a level playin... more At first glance, “postidentity” relegates identity concerns to history and signals a level playing field for artists from diverse backgrounds working today. Yet when one compares post-black, post-Chicano, post-Indian, and other “posts,” their tensions become clear. Each phrase signals a specific history that includes discrimination, political struggles, and changing cultural forms. Each situates the present in relation to the past of the group it names, generating a subtler range of meanings than the generic term “postidentity” allows. Countering the discourse’s tendency toward abstraction, we ask when, how, and for whom the particulars matter.

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Art History, Feb 2016

In 1846, thirteen Ojibwa men, women, and children performed tableaux vivants or ‘living pictures’... more In 1846, thirteen Ojibwa men, women, and children performed tableaux vivants or
‘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.’

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American Art, Mar 2015

This essay reevaluates the early paintings of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (ca. 1900–1986) in light o... more This essay reevaluates the early paintings of Hopi artist Fred Kabotie (ca. 1900–1986) in light of their forgotten inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1932. Kabotie painted images of ceremonial dances alongside Pueblo peers in Santa Fe in the 1910s, at the height of federal assimilation policies. American patrons supported the painters as a means of constructing an indigenous artistic identity for the nation. But the display of Pueblo paintings in Venice marked the limits of aesthetic nationalism, failing to convince overseas audiences that America possessed an artistic treasury older and more authentic than that of Europe. The author recovers Kabotie’s broader engagement with issues of displacement, memory, and embodiment. She proposes that the paintings share a visual logic with musical notation and other diagrams, transmitting the sensibility of Hopi dances across gaps in time and space. They resonate with the politics of memory in recent work by Native artists at the Venice Biennale.

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