jaune-quick-to-see-smith

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Image Placeholder 940px — *Memory Map*, 2000, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

“

A retrospective that redefines what ‘American’ means.

”

The New York Times

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

Feb 29 – May 12 2024
Seattle Art Museum
Simonyi Special Exhibition Galleries

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Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is one of the most innovative and significant artists of her generation. Engaging languages of abstraction, expressionism, and Pop Art throughout her work, she interrogates American life and identity from her Native perspective. Her approach lifts images and ideas from art history, environmentalism, popular culture, and mass media to redraw the boundaries of contemporary American art. As a multifaceted artist, activist, curator, and educator, she positions Native American art at the center of today’s critical dialogues around land, social justice, preservation, and sustainability. Memory Map—the largest and most comprehensive retrospective of her work to date—brings together over five decades of Smith’s paintings, drawings, and sculptures to question why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value over others.

This exhibition was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Generous support for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map is provided by the Henry Luce Foundation and the Terra Foundation for American Art.

WARRIOR FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

a sketch of a woman with long dark hair and a pink and yellow shirt on turquoise paper — *Self-Portrait*, 1974, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

“

THESE ARE MY STORIES, EVERY PICTURE, EVERY DRAWING IS TELLING A STORY. I CREATE MEMORY MAPS.

”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Born in 1940 at Saint Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, Smith is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. As a child, she traveled to various reservations with her father, an accomplished horse trader, and taught herself to draw animals on scrap paper and in dirt. She also faced discrimination in foster homes and public schools. She took drawing classes in high school and junior college before going on to receive her Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic Junior College (now Olympic College) in Bremerton, Washington in 1960. After studying at the University of Washington, she received her Bachelor of Art in Arts Education at Framingham State College in Massachusetts in 1976. In 1980, she received her Master’s Degree in Art at the University of New Mexico. In 1978, Smith’s artwork was included in Native Art Now at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, her first museum show. With the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas in 1992, she curated Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs for the Smithsonian Institution, an exhibition that recast dominant histories of Columbus’s landing in the Americas and amplified the voices of Indigenous artists. In 1996, she began work on the West Seattle Cultural Trail in collaboration with Joe Feddersen (Coleville) and Donald Fels. The mile-long trail, which still stands today, celebrates the geography and history–both human and natural–of the area through the intervention of history, biology, geology, storytelling, and images.

Over the course of her five-decade career, Smith has had over 90 solo exhibitions, curated more than 30 exhibitions, and lectured at some 200 universities, museums, and conferences to become one of the most acclaimed Indigenous creatives working today. As an artist, activist, storyteller, and educator, she leads a new generation of Native Americans working to redefine their cultures’ relationship to contemporary American life and its tumultuous past.

ALIEN NATION

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s artwork is rooted in conversations about the legacies and life of the land she calls home. As a Native artist living in the contemporary United States, she reckons with issues such as land rights, occupied spaces, and the natural environment. Her early works—such as Wallowa Waterhole Series: Fireweed (1979) and Kalispell #1 (1979)—engage Indigenous epistemologies of mapping as storytelling as opposed to geopolitical divide. These pastel and charcoal drawings resist colonial narratives of land use by depicting “inhabited landscapes” that track the movement of humans and animals in these spaces long before Western interference.

As her artistic practice developed, Smith amplified her statements about the presence of Native Americans in the United States. In 1992, she painted Indian Map, her first recognizable map of the country in which brushstrokes and drips blur states’ borders and collaged texts and photographs tell stories of the land’s vast Indigenous presence. Additional map paintings from the 1990s and early 2000s highlight the willful historical amnesia of Indigenous life, while later maps, created in the 2020s, are rotated 90 degrees in an attempt to further destabilize the presumptive power of maps. To initiate dialogues on consumerism, racism, war, and cultural preservation, Smith also incorporates trade canoes, bison, and horses into her work—as seen in works such as Genesis (1993), War Horse in Babylon (2005), and Trade Canoe: Making Medicine (2018).

A skeleton walking and holding up another human like figure thats painted colorfully — *Indian Map*, 1992, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

“

MOTHER EARTH GIVES LIFE TO EVERYTHING—THE ANIMALS, PLANTS, EVERYTHING COMES FROM THE EARTH MOTHER AND WE COME FROM HER, TOO… THIS IS THE BASIC PREMISE THAT FEEDS [MY] PAINTINGS.

”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

CECI N’EST PAS UNE PEACE PIPE

American Flag with speakers on the top right corners of the flag, all hanging on a white wall — *McFlag*, 1996, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

“

[MY] WORK INVOLVES EXAMINING CONTEMPORARY LIFE IN AMERICA AND INTERPRETING IT THROUGH NATIVE IDEOLOGY.

”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Imagery pulled from American visual culture populates many of Smith’s artworks. Her inclusion of artistic motifs typically associated with abstraction, expressionism, and Pop Art serve as a common language to communicate her complex messages of contemporary Native life. The Red Mean: Self Portrait (1992) and McFlag (1996) exemplify this point: universally recognizable texts and symbols— such as ‘MADE IN THE USA,’ Leonard da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, and Mickey Mouse—play central roles, signaling Smith’s interest in confronting the hypocrisy of contemporary America. Meanwhile, her Tonto and the Lone Ranger Series (2002) reclaims the long-running television series’s sidekick, recasting him from a stereotypical “Indian” into the story’s hero.

Humor and satire are also central to Smith’s work. As cornerstones of her visual language, she employs these tools to facilitate discussions on Indigenous resilience and survival. Ceci n’est pas une peace pipe (1993) transforms René Magritte’s famed surrealist print with a cheeky twist of phrase. Another noteworthy work, Paper Dolls for a Post-Colonial World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government (1991) is rendered with a comic strip-like iconography as it contemplates the stereotyping and exploitation of Native people. Here, Smith reappropriates the appropriators, using the dolls to relay a story drenched in sarcasm.

War Is Heck

The brutality of colonialism and atrocities of war are recurring themes across Smith’s oeuvre. War is Heck (2002) critiques the George W. Bush administration’s post-9/11 policies, which led to war in the Middle East and the looting and destruction of Sumerian artifacts. A medley of images—including a Trojan horse, the American flag, and bold text —deepen the lithograph’s meaning as it considers the absurdity of war and a government that willingly gambles with its citizens’ lives. In Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) (1992), a painted canoe becomes a stage on which to express the exploitative history of colonialism. Objects branded with derogatory sports mascots and mass-produced children’s toys such as faux-feather headdresses and plastic tomahawks hang above the boat in a scathing rebuttal to the worthless trinkets and contaminated goods offered by the United States government in their colonial-era treaty negotiations with tribal nations.

Smith has long acknowledged the influence of European and American artists in the development of her practice, going so far as to appropriate their images and infuse them with new meaning—most notably, renowned 20th-century artist Jasper Johns’s iconic renderings of the American flag, targets, and maps. Smith takes Johns’s deadpan depiction of American symbols to critique the consumer culture from her position as a Native American woman. In Sovereign Nations (2002), similarly evocative of Johns's artistic style, Smith applies elements of the American flag to dresses made for three generations of Indigenous women. In stacking the star-covered dresses atop one another, Smith alters the original work by asking viewers to consider the critical role Indigenous women play within the nation’s broader culture.

a collage of words and iconography referring to America, War, and Cattle with a huge painting of a horse outline on top — *War is Heck*, 2002, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

“

ART SHOULD REVEAL THE UNKNOWN, TO THOSE WHO LACK THE EXPERIENCE OF SEEING IT.

”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

MY EXISTENCE Is A MIRACLE

1940

Born at St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Spends much of her childhood in Western Washington. Starts painting and drawing in the first grade.

1960

Completes her associates degree at Olympic Junior College (now Olympic College) in Bremerton, WA and continues her education over a 16-year period. Studies at the University of Washington andworks and raises a family.

1976

After studying at the University of Washington, working a variety of jobs, and raising a family, completes her Bachelor of Arts in Arts Education at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. Moves her family to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend graduate school at the University of New Mexico.

1976–1979

Begins to engage with the idea of mapping in her artwork, incorporating languages of abstraction to depict places meaningful to her, including Kalispell, Montana and Wallow, Oregon.

1977

Forms the Grey Canyon Collective alongside other Indigenous artists—including Larry Emerson, Conrad House, Emmi Whitehorse, Paul Willeto, and Felice Lucero—to offer support and seek out opportunities to share their work.

1978 & 1979

Begins to exhibit her work. Included in Native Art Now at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa, Fe, New Mexico, in 1978, and has her first solo exhibitions at Clark Benton Gallery in Santa Fe and in 1979, at Kornblee Gallery in New York City.

1980

Receives her Masters in Art from the University of New Mexico.

1985–1992

Curates several noteworthy exhibitions of work by contemporary Indigenous artists, including, with Harmony Hammond, Photographing Ourselves: Contemporary Native American Photography (Silver Image Gallery, Seattle, 1992) and Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage (Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 1987).

1992

Curates Submuloc Show/Columbus Wohs, an exhibition challenging accepted histories of Christopher Columbus on the occasion of the quincentennial of his landing in the Americas. Completes her first map painting as well as Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), two artworks exploring concepts of property ownership and stolen land.

1993

Oche Wat Te Ou opens at the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco, This reflection garden—created alongside Luseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican artist James Luna, and in consultation with the Ohlone people—is first of several public art projects realized by Smith.

1996

Begins work on the West Seattle Cultural Trail, a multiphase public artwork created in collaboration with Joe Feddersen (Coleville) and Donald Fels.

1996

Subversions/Affirmations: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a Survey, her first significant survey exhibition, opens at the Jersey City Museum, travels to Lehigh University Art Galleries, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; the Austin Museum of Art at Laguna Gloria,Texas; and Missoula Art Museum, Montana.

1998

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith opens at Sacred Circle Gallery of American Indian Art, Daybreak Star Cultural Center, Discovery Park, Seattle.

2002

Receives the College Art Association Committee on Women in the Arts Award. This is only one of her many honors, which also include recognition from the Joan Mitchell Foundation (1996), Women’s Caucus for Art (1997), The Eiteljorg Museum (1999), the National Academy of Design and Art Table (2011), the Woodson Foundation (2014), and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art (2023).

2003 – 2009

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America opens at the Belger Arts Center for Creative Studies at the University of Missouri in Kansas City and travels to multiple venues over a six-year period.

2014

Admitted to the New Mexico Women’s Hall of Fame.

2023

Her career survey, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map opens at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, making her the first Native American woman to have a solo show at the Whitney. The exhibition travels to the Fort Worth Museum of Art and SAM.

2023

Curates The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, making Smith the first artist to curate an exhibition at the museum.

Memory Map, 2000, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, oil, acrylic, and paper on canvas, 36 × 48 in., OZ Art NWA, Bentonville, Arkansas, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, burlap, fabric, polyester batting, dried corn, leather thongs, beaded leather bands, necklaces, book (God Is Red by Vine Deloria Jr.), pheasant wings, American flag, beaded hide moccasins, two framed ink and graphite pencil drawings, Masonite cradleboard, animal hide, sheepskin and fleece, bird feet, wood chair, and painted plywood, 52 × 34 × 20 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase, with funds from the Director’s Discretionary Fund; courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, Fabricated by Andy Ambrose, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Photograph by Neal Ambrose-Smith Going Forward/Looking Back, 1996, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, oil, acrylic, paper, newspaper, and fabric on canvas, two panels: 50 × 120 in. overall, Collection of Garth Greenan and Peter Kelly, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Photograph courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. Self-Portrait, 1974, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, pastel, graphite pencil, and charcoal on paper, 23 × 18 in., Collection of the artist; courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery, New York, © Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith. Indian Map, 1992, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, oil, paper, newspaper, and fabric on canvas, two panels: 64 × 96 in. overall, Private collection, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Photograph by David Bowers. McFlag, 1996, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, oil, paper, and newspaper on canvas with speakers and electrical cord, three parts: 60 × 100 in. overall, Tia Collection. Fabricated by Neal Ambrose-Smith, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Photograph courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. War is Heck, 2002, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, lithograph, photolithograph, and collage, 58 9/16 × 57 5/8 in., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Dorothee Peiper-Riegraf and Hinrech Peiper 2006.287, Printed by Catherine Chauvin, with Matt Ebert, Published by P.R.I.N.T. Press, Denton, Texas, © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

Seattle Art Museum respectfully acknowledges that we are on Indigenous land, the traditional territories of the Coast Salish people. We honor our ongoing connection to these communities past, present, and future.

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