Influential Indigenous painter Jaune Quick-to-See Smith passed away on January 24th at 85, following her diagnosis of pancreatic cancer. Her death was confirmed by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, where she was represented.
Smith, a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, leveraged her art to amplify the voices of Indigenous Americans, drawing attention to issues around land rights. Her innovative paintings and assemblages reclaim lost histories and symbols, providing a poignant critique of the neglect faced by Native Americans.
“Jaune’s loss is deeply felt and indescribably significant,” said gallerist Garth Greenan. “She was a beloved mentor and friend and truly one of the most thoughtful and talented human beings I have encountered. She was one of the very brightest lights in contemporary American art. If a more generous person ever existed, I’d like to meet them.”
Born in 1940 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Smith spent her early life with her father, a horse trader, and sister. In her youth, Smith never planned to become an artist, working in the fields and canneries of Montana. However, after an art teacher encouraged her to pursue art, she enrolled in an arts program at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. She received an associate degree in 1960. Smith stopped her education for nearly two decades to support her family, working various jobs as a waitress, janitor, and librarian, among others. By 1976, she completed her bachelor’s degree in art education at Framingham State College in Massachusetts. From there, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in visual arts at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. She graduated in 1980.
As a graduate student, Smith co-founded the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of Indigenous artists including Felice Lucero, Emmi Whitehorse, Larry Emerson, Conrad House, and Paul Willeto. The group’s first solo exhibition was held in 1979 at the American Indian Community House in New York. Throughout the late 1970s and into the ’80s, Smith often embellished her abstract landscapes with various pictographic symbolism inspired by her ancestry.
Smith’s work with the Grey Canyon Group, where she worked to put Indigenous artists on the map, continued throughout her career. She curated over 30 major exhibitions, including “The Land Carries Our Ancestors” at the National Gallery of Art in 2023, the institution’s first exhibition of Native American art in three decades, and “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” which will open at the Zimmerli Art Museum on February 1st.
Smith’s work from the 1990s onwards often integrated painted elements with everyday objects. One of her notable pieces from this period is I See Red: Target (1992), which features a dart board mounted above a canvas adorned with newspaper clippings and racist caricatures linked to the newly renamed NFL team the Washington Commanders. The work, part of a series in response to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing in North America, became the first painting by a Native American to be acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 2020. Elsewhere, the artist became known for her cartographic paintings, where she labeled maps of the United States with names of tribes.
Throughout her five-decade career, Smith presented solo exhibitions at Garth Greenan Gallery, Accola Griefen Gallery, and the Holter Museum of Art, among others. The retrospective “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map,” mounted by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023, featured 130 pieces—her largest survey exhibition.
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