Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a painter who revolutionized the landscape genre and paved a path to success for generations of Native American artists that followed, died on January 24 at 85. Her death was confirmed by Garth Greenan Gallery, her New York–based representative.
A citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, Smith used her art to powerfully assert that she and other Native Americans bore a strong connection to the ancestral lands that had been stripped away from them. In her game-changing paintings and assemblages, she reclaimed lost histories, investigated centuries-old symbols, and acerbically critiqued complacency toward the plight of Native Americans.
Quoting from works by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and other mid-20th century giants, she frequently infused ready-made objects into her paintings. Maps figured in many of her works as a means of exploring land ownership.
“A map is not an empty form for me, it’s not an icon of this incredible country,” she told T: The New York Times Style Magazine. “It’s not just a vacant idea, it’s real. It’s about real land—stolen land, polluted land.”
While Smith remains best known for her artistic practice, with her place in the canon cemented by a 2023 Whitney Museum retrospective, she also worked as an activist, an educator, and even a curator. Binding all of her work was a commitment to upholding Native American perspectives, which until very recently were all but shut out of mainstream institutions.
Evidence of her influence abounds. It was apparent in 2023 when Smith curated “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” the first show of contemporary Native American art ever held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Smith’s usage of everyday materials seemed to have moved other participants, from Natalie Ball to Nicholas Galanin, to do the same.
Further proof of her influence is likely to be evident at Rutgers University’s Zimmerli Art Museum, where Smith organized the survey show “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” set to open February 1.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana in 1940. Her father was a horse trader; her mother left when Smith was still two years old.
In school, much of her cohort was Japanese American immigrants. In her spare time, she worked in the fields, where she cut rhubarb and picked fruit. She repeatedly described her childhood as “dystopian,” and even said that, when she was a teenager, she considered suicide. Art ended up giving her the hope she needed when she saw the 1952 film Moulin Rouge and observed its portrayal of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, a Post-Impressionist who perseverance struck a chord.
Yet initially, Smith did not set out to become an artist. She recalled that while she was in high school, she was told by a white adviser that “Indians don’t go to college.” Instead, she did college prep. With her confidence bolstered by an art teacher who praised her drawing abilities, she ended up receiving an associate art degree in 1960.
There followed a period when it seemed that Smith was hardly on the track to becoming an art star. She met her partner, Andy Ambrose, and had kids; she worked as a waitress and a janitor to support her family. She would eventually receive a bachelor’s degree, in 1976, from Framingham State College in Massachusetts, but it was not in art.
Things began to change in the years afterward, when, as a student at the University of New Mexico, she formed the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of Indigenous artists that also included Emmi Whitehorse, Conrad House, Larry Emerson, and Paul Willeto. In 1979, collective had a solo show at the American Indian Community House, a New York space founded by painter G. Peter Jemison. That same year, Smith had her first solo New York gallery show, having already had a Santa Fe exhibition in 1978.
Some of Smith’s earliest works are striking because they appear so different from the mixed-media pieces on which she made her name. Starting in 1985, Smith began producing the “Petroglyph Park” series, a group of abstract paintings that are based on ancient petroglyphs seen along the the Rio Grande in New Mexico. These works, she would later tell Art in America, were a means of recording Native American history.
“What I’m doing with my art is extracting what I know is relevant information in today’s world,” she said. “Each piece tells a story and it revolves around this genocide and what has been taken away from us.”
During the ’90s, Smith began making large-scale works that combined painted elements and objects harvested from everyday life.
In 1992, she created Target, for which Smith placed a dart board above a long canvas featuring clippings from newspapers from the Flathead Indian Reservation. There were also reproductions of racist imagery associated with the Washington Commanders, an NFL team that shared its name with an epithet for Native Americans until 2020. “DESTROY THE MYTH,” reads appropriated newspaper text pasted to the canvas, whose name alludes to—and upends—a similarly titled Jasper Johns painting. Target became the first painting by a Native American ever to enter the National Gallery of Art collection when the museum acquired it in 2020.
Other works from the ’90s onward featured US maps that Smith altered. Indian Map (1992) featured a map of the country that dripped with paint, with rivulets of black running across clipped headlines touting national progress and repeating racist tropes about Native Americans. Survival Map (2021) is a painting that has the map of the US turned on its side; text applied to its center reads, “NDN humor Causes people To survive.”
Unlike those of many crucial artists of the past half-century, Smith’s CV lists no appearances in the Venice Biennale or Documenta, or even in the Whitney Biennial, frequently considered the most important recurring survey of American art. But through her curating and through work less easily to categorize, she constructed a network of Native American artists that remains strong.
Emmi Whitehorse, who exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale, once told the New York Times that Smith was a “mother hen” who “took it on herself to teach me the ropes.” Jeffrey Gibson, a Choctaw-Cherokee artist who became the first Native artist to represent the US solo during the same Biennale, told the Times that Smith had provided him with a “unified model” of how a Native American could wear many different hats within a single institutional space.
In bringing together such an intergenerational dialogue, Smith also showed that Native Americans were all part of a shared history. That history, she said, was rooted in the land, which formed the loose subject of her 2023 National Gallery of Art show.
“Native ideology insists that we are part of the sacred, from the solar dust on this planet as well as our bodies recycling with the ancestors and all other living things,” she wrote in an essay published in the exhibition’s catalog. “We believe that anywhere we walk, and especially in our homelands, we have been here so long that we stir the DNA of our ancestors.”
