Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025)
182Jan. 31, 2025
Pathbreaking artist, activist, educator, and curatorJaune Quick-to-See Smith, known for her paintings and sculptures fusing wry humor with sharp sociopolitical commentary, died of pancreatic cancer January 24 at her home in Corrales, New Mexico. She was eighty-five. News of her death was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery, which represents her. Smith, an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, across a career spanning five decades created visually arresting works that illuminated the injustices faced by Indigenous people in the US and brought attention to their lived daily experience. The first Native American person ever to have their work acquired by the Congressionally established National Gallery of Art—at the shockingly late date of 2020—she unfailingly and with great gusto elevated the contemporary work of her Indigenous peers. Smith’s own work skillfully placed traditional Native symbols and tropes in conversation with modernist forms inspired by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg to offer an unflinching look at the ravages wrought by both historic colonization and the unthinking racism of present-day pop culture. “Art should reveal the unknown,” she said, “to those who lack the experience of seeing it.”
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born on January 15, 1940, in the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana. Her barely teenage mother disappeared when Smith was still a toddler; her much older father, a horse trader, moved frequently, taking his young daughter with him. Between the ages of eight and fifteen, when she wasn’t in school, Smith worked in the fields, harvesting rhubarb and raspberries alongside adult migrants. Though fascinated with art from an early age, “I wasn’t inside of a museum until I was in my 20s,” she told theNew York Times’sT Magazinein 2021. Discouraged by professors and administrators from pursuing an art career owing to her sex and Indigenous heritage, Smith for years struggled to fit her college studies in among the various jobs she was out of financial necessity forced to hold to support her young family, including those of factory worker, waitress, veterinary assistant, and janitor. She earned her first degree, in art education, in 1976, from Framingham State College in Massachusetts, receiving her MA in visual art from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1980.
By the time of her graduation, Smith had already stirred art-world interest with a 1979 solo show of pastels at New York’s Kornblee Gallery, which netted her a glowing review inArt in America. Much of her work of the 1970s and ’80s comprised what she called “inhabited landscapes,” abstract works featuring figures—such as those of Native leaders or her own horse—in their natural habitats, often overlaid with pictographic symbols. Initially creating these from pastels or paint, she soon began incorporating elements such as scraps of fabric and wire, which lent the works a tangible physical aspect that reflected that of the depicted desert vistas.
By the 1990s, she was making the large-scale painted collages for which she would become widely known. Her eleven-foot-high 1992 workI See Red:Target, for example, created in response to the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus arriving in North America, set a dart board above a red-paint-splashed canvas festooned with racist logos and imagery advertising the Washington, DC, football team now known as the Commanders. Maps, too, came to figure in her oeuvre during this period, as exemplified byState Namesof 2000, a map of the US that leaves visible only the names of states that can be traced to Indigenous words. Her “Trade Canoes” series of large-scale paintings and sculptures, begun in the 1990s, addressed, via depictions of the titular vessels laden with various items, the forcing of Native people from their land, the commercial appropriation of their culture, and the impact colonizing forces have had on the environment.Trade Canoe for the North Pole, 2017, for example, comments on climate change, the vessel bearing an arsenal of plants and animals native to warmer southern regions, suggesting that they might find similar climes once they reach their destination. Smith during her lifetime also created several collaborative public artworks, among them the terrazzo floor in the Great Hall of the Denver International Airport; an in-situ sculpture in San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Gardens; and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle.
Smith was also an accomplished curator and a tireless connector of people. While still a student in Albuquerque, she founded the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of Native American artists who exhibited their work together, both domestically and internationally. She would go on to exhibit more than thirty group exhibitions featuring Indigenous artists. Among them was the highly regarded “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage” (1985), which likely ledto the inclusion of her work alongside that of a number of her peers in Lucy Lippard’s landmark 1990 volumeMixed Blessings. In 2023, she curated “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans” at the National Gallery of Art, the first exhibition of contemporary Native American art to take place there in three decades.
Smith’sTargetwas acquired by the National Gallery in 2020. In 2023, she was the subject of the retrospective “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. The exhibition was the first retrospective awarded to an Indigenous artist by the institution since its founding in 1930. Smith’s work is held in the collections of major arts institutions including the Denver Art Museum; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Whitney, all in New York; and the National Museum of Women in the Arts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, both in Washington, DC. The last group show she curated, “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” will open at theZimmerli Art Museumin New Brunswick, New Jersey, on February 1.