Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Born January 15, 1940 at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on her reservation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana. Smith received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960, a BA in Art Education from Framingham State College, Massachusetts in 1976, and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980.
Smith created complex abstract paintings and prints for over five decades. Known for her poetic, curious, and profound interpretations of America’s particular forms of bigotry toward Native peoples, the artist’s sharp humor pierced through the heavy topics of race, colonialism, pollution, genocide, and survival. Combining appropriated imagery from commercial slogans and signage, art history and personal narratives, she forged an intimate visual language to convey her insistent socio-political commentary with astounding power. As critic Gerrit Henry, (Art in America, 2001) writes: “For all the primal nature of her origins, Smith adeptly takes on contemporary American society in her paintings, drawings and prints, looking at things Native and national through bifocals of the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the witty.”
From the first years of her career, Smith took every opportunity to bring the work of Native artists to the attention of curators, critics, and historians, organizing pivotal group exhibitions like Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage (1985) with Harmony Hammond. Partly due to these efforts, she and her contemporaries were featured in Lucy Lippard’s 1990 classic Mixed Blessings. After decades of professional successes, Smith’s commitment to highlight the miracle of Native Americans’ continued existence showed no signs of waning.
The artist repeatedly overcame the immense headwinds of gender and race, deliberately clearing space for others as she went. Hers was the first painting by a Native artist to be acquired by the National Gallery of Art. In 2023, she became the first Native artist to be given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum when they mounted Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map—the most comprehensive exhibit of the artist’s work to date.
Smith received numerous awards such as the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, l987; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, 1996; the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, 1997; the College Art Association Women’s Award, 2002; Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Woman’s Award, 2005; New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005. Art Table Artist Honoree, New York, 2011; Visionary Woman Award, Moore College, Pennsylvania, 2011; Elected to the National Academy of Art, New York, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction Award, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award, 2014; The Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015, a United States Artists fellowship in 2020, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2021, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2022, and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award in 2023, among many others. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Smith’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.