Jessica L. Horton

This postdoctoral fellowship at the Smithsonian American Art Museum will support two interrelated projects. The first is to transform my dissertation, “Places to Stand: Histories of Native American Art Beyond the Nation” into a book that traces the aesthetic, conceptual, and historical dimensions of Native American artists’ movement beyond national borders, as they joined their international peers at art biennales and residencies abroad in the late twentieth century. I will work to answer two key questions: What can the inclusion of forgotten, transnational histories of Native American art tell us about the history of twentieth-century American art in general? What tools might we, as historians of American art, develop in order to reposition Native American artists as agents who have shaped our shared pasts in unexpected ways?

I also will pursue integral research in Smithsonian archives in Washington, D.C., and at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, for a journal article tentatively titled “Diplomatic Choreographies: The Travels of Native American Dance Paintings during the Cold War.” The project foregrounds exhibitions of Native American watercolor paintings of ritual dances and everyday life that traveled to American embassies in Tehran, Jerusalem, New Delhi, and elsewhere under the auspices of the U.S. Information Agency and the Art in Embassies Program from 1953–66. As my title suggests, I am interested in investigating the multiple, intersecting forms of diplomacy— indigenous, national, and transnational—that surrounded the paintings as they traveled to meet local visitors abroad. Both “Places to Stand” and “Diplomatic Choreographies” seek to understand the ways in which works of Native American art interacted with local, national, and transnational imaginations across the twentieth century.