Reframing Modern Art of the American Southwest: Patricia Marroquin Norby in conversation with Jessica Horton

Recorded on via Zoom on Thursday, April 22, 2021, at 6 p.m., this program is part of the Spring 2021 Lunder Institute Talks, a series of live, unscripted conversations with scholars and artists who are shaping the field of American art.

Explore new research shaping understanding of modern art of the American Southwest—the focus of the Lunder Institute’s Research Fellows Program in 2021–22. University of Delaware professor Jessica Horton (2021–22 Distinguished Scholar) and the Met’s Associate Curator of Native American Art Patricia Marroquin Norby (2021–22 Research Fellow) will discuss some of the questions guiding their research. How, for example, have the social and environmental upheavals of western expansion been registered—or suppressed—in art made during the first half of the 20th century by makers of diverse heritages? How might Indigenous and environmental justice change our analysis of historical materials? What methods are most needed today to address the legacies of colonialism and its contestation in Southwest modernisms and American art history more broadly?

Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha) oversees the Native American art collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s American Wing. An award-winning art scholar and museum leader, she served as Senior Executive and Assistant Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian-New York and as Director of the D’Arcy McNickle Center for American Indian and Indigenous Studies at the Newberry in Chicago. Her forthcoming book, Water, Bones, and Bombs (University of Nebraska Press), examines twentieth-century American Indian art and environmental disputes in northern New Mexico. She earned her MFA from University of Wisconsin Madison and her PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

Jessica L. Horton is an associate professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Delaware and the 2021–2022 Distinguished Scholar at the Lunder Institute for American Art. Her first book, Art for an Undivided Earth: The American Indian Movement Generation (2017), traces the impact of Indigenous spatial struggles on artists working internationally since the 1970s. Her current book project, Earth Diplomacy: Indigenous American Art and Reciprocity, 1953–1973, examines how artists revitalized long-standing Indigenous cultures of diplomacy in the unlikely shape of Cold War tours, translating Native political ecologies across two decades and four continents.