Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born January 15, 1940, Flathead Reservation, Montana, U.S.) Native American artist whose drawings, paintings, sculptures, and prints build on Modernist vocabularies to explore Native American history, identity, and sociopolitical relationship with the United States. Art critic Jillian Steinhauer wrote in The New York Times in 2023, “Part of what makes Smith’s practice fascinating is the tension it carries between her embrace of more Eurocentric, modernist methods and her pro-Indigenous, environmentalist, anticapitalist messages.”

Early life and education

Smith was born in the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on Montana’s Flathead Reservation. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. When they were young, Smith and her sister were raised primarily by their father, Arthur, a horse trader, and often accompanied him on his trips throughout the Pacific Northwest and California. Smith attended Puyallup High School, near Tacoma, Washington, where she was told by a white adviser that Native Americans did not attend college. She ignored the advice and went on to Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, where she took art classes and was told by her art teacher that, though she drew better than the men in the class, she couldn’t be an artist because she was a woman. Nevertheless, Smith went on to earn an Associate of Arts degree in 1960. She later attended the University of Washington, Seattle, and then Framingham State College (now Framingham State University) in Massachusetts, where she received a B.A. degree (1976) in art education. Smith also obtained a master’s degree (1980) in art from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Maps

While in graduate school, Smith began making abstract landscapes, or what she often called “maps.” Working with pastels, charcoal, or paint and building on 19th-century American landscape painting and the formal qualities of Expressionism, Smith created an entirely new way of representing a place. She flattened the space, forgoing a horizon line, and added blocks of colour symbolizing fields, flowers, grasslands, and water. Smith populated these landscapes with marks suggesting the movement of animals and humans and incorporated the ancient petroglyphs, glyphs, and pictographs of Native tribes that she had researched. These maps became a frequent feature in Smith’s work and a key vehicle for addressing issues of environmentalism and documenting tribal history and memories.

Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People)

In the early 1990s Smith’s art shifted toward the layered canvases for which she is best known. Thinking about the art of American artists Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, she began pasting newspaper clippings and found objects onto her canvases, applying a translucent layer of paint over and around the objects, and painting an outline of items or animals often associated with Native Americans, such as a teepee or a bison. One such work, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) (1992), is collaged with articles from the Flathead Reservation’s Char-Koosta News, historical photos, and pages from comics, gum wrappers, and other objects featuring stereotypical images of Native Americans. Using expressive brush strokes, she applied blocks of paint over the collage in white, yellow, green, and red. Over these layers, Smith painted the outline of an almost life-sized canoe. She then strung a clothesline above the canvas and hung an assortment of toys and souvenirs, including a plastic tomahawk, Red Man chewing tobacco, a Washington Redskins cap, a Cleveland Indians pennant, and a beaded belt. In an essay on the piece, art historian Suzanne Fricke posits that “Smith offers these cheap goods in exchange for the lands that were lost, reversing the historic sale of land for trinkets. These items also serve as reminders of how Native life has been commodified, turning Native cultural objects into cheap items sold without a true understanding of what the original meanings were.”

The Grey Canyon Group and exhibitions

For decades, as both a woman and a Native American artist, Smith found little acceptance in the traditional art world. In 1977 she formed the Grey Canyon Group with Native artists Emmi Whitehorse, Conrad House, Larry Emerson, Paul Little, Felice Lucero, and Ed Singer. The collective worked together to find galleries that would show their work and to spread awareness of contemporary Native American artists. Their first shows were held in such institutions as the American Indian Community House (1979), New York, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (1980), Santa Fe, New Mexico, where audiences were perplexed that their art comprised abstract painting and sculpture, not the stereotypical pottery, beadwork, and textiles they were expecting. Nonetheless, Smith’s tireless efforts ultimately gained traction, and over the years she organized over 30 exhibitions, two of which were shows in 1992 that challenged the celebrations surrounding the 500-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas.

Over the years, Smith’s work continued to gain notice. It entered the collections of such major institutions as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, New York City; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. During her 50-year career, Smith has exhibited her work in over 100 shows, and in 2023 the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City organized a major exhibition of her work, “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map.” It was the first major retrospective for a Native American artist at the museum.