Jessica L. Horton is a scholar of modern and contemporary Native North American art. She grew up in the oak-forested coastal hills of northern California. Pomo baskets, intricate vessels woven from the land, were her introduction to art history. Her research and teaching foreground Native American artists as leaders in a global story of modernity. Horton has published widely on the relationships among Indigenous knowledge, creative practice, ecology, diplomacy, and globalization. Her work confronts the violence of colonialism and ecocide while demonstrating how Indigenous arts can act as creative emissaries of alternative worlds. She balances academic projects with land stewardship, backpacking trips, and quilting.

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 mobilized longstanding Indigenous cultures of diplomacy to place the earth at the center of international relations. Professor Horton is currently working on two major projects. Fire Oppression: A Basket Ecology of Indigenous California, examines an extraordinary group of Indigenous baskets that gives shape to the shifting political ecology of fire in what is now California from the 1700s to the present. Woven Vessels, Pomo Futures encompasses plans to co-teach a field study for University of Delaware doctoral students with Pomo weavers in 2025, lead a graduate student collective to curate an exhibition of baskets in 2026, and edit an open-access digital publication that will connect historical baskets to archival findings and the art and voices of contemporary weavers. Foregrounding the perspectives of Indigenous stakeholders in the arts, her scholarship aims to build a diverse and creative toolkit for addressing the accelerating ecocrises of our shared planet. 

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. She is a professor in the Department of Art History at the University of Delaware, where she is proud to mentor a new generation of scholars and curators in the Native North American art field. Her research has been supported by the Getty Research Institute, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Andy Warhol Foundation/Creative Capital Award, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the Social Science Research Council, the Huntington Library, and more.