Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

https://americanart.si.edu/artist/jaune-quick-see-smith-4505

 

western gallery - wwu 2023

 Native American of French-Cree, Shoshone, and Salish blood, New Mexican artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith creates paintings and drawings that reflect her upbringing in a household where art and horses were equally important. In the initial stages of her career, Smith's painted landscapes inevitably contained a "portrait" of her horse Cheyenne shown with tepees, tools, pottery, and other Indian artifacts. Eventually Smith began to incorporate collage elements into her paintings, adding bits of calico and muslin fabric and wire mesh over which she lavished paint. The result was surfaces 

that acquired a texture and 

topography reminiscent of the landscapes she was depicting. Smith is part of the new generation of Native American artists who are helping to redefine their culture's relationship to contemporary American life and its problematic past. She lives and works in Albuquerque, in close proximity to the land that inspires much of her art.

 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born 1940) is a Native American visual artist and curator. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and is also of Métis and Shoshone descent.[1] She is also an art educator, art advocate, and political activist. She has been prolific in her long career, and her work draws from a Native worldview and comments on American Indian identity, histories of oppression, and environmental issues.

In the mid-1970s, Smith gained prominence as a painter and printmaker,[2][3] and later she advanced her style and technique with collage, drawing, and mixed media. Her works have been widely exhibited and many are in the permanent collections of prominent art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art,[11] the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Walker Art Center as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum[12] and National Museum of Women in the Arts.[13] Her work has also been collected by New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe)[14] and Albuquerque Museum,[15] both located in a landscape that has continually served as one of her greatest sources of inspiration. In 2020 the National Gallery of Art announced it had bought her painting I See Red: Target (1992), which thus became the first painting on canvas by a Native American artist in the gallery.[2]

Smith actively supports the Native arts community by organizing exhibitions and project collaborations, and she has also participated in national commissions for public works. She lives in Corrales, New Mexico, near the Rio Grande, with her family.   -Wikipedia

Videos:

Memory Map, at the Whitney Museum of American Art

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith CBS Morning 

Artists Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Cree/Shoshone) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee) discuss their work-Smithsonian

 

Cultural Affiliation(s)