Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Who Bore Witness to Native Life, Dies at 85

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a groundbreaking visual artist, curator, and activist, died on Friday, January 24, at her home in Corrales, New Mexico, at the age of 85 after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The news of Smith’s death was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2017.

As part of a generation of Indigenous artists who tirelessly worked to “break the ‘buckskin ceiling'” in the art world, Smith (an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is known for a prolific arts practice that merged piercing humor and profound socio-political commentary with poetic depictions of Native American life. Her five-decade oeuvre, which spans painting, collage, drawing, print, and sculpture, is an intimate visual lexicon that bridges personal memories and joyful resilience, exemplifying her lifelong refusal to be defined by any singular narrative.

Born on January 15, 1940, on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, the artist grew up alongside her sister traveling with their father, a horse trader, around the Pacific Northwest and California, where she worked with him in canneries and on farms while attending school. 

“I have memory of making things with my hands from mud, leaves, sticks and rocks from very early in my life,” Smith said in an artist statement for the Brooklyn Museum, describing how art allowed her to enter “another world, one that took me out of the violence and fear that dominated my life.”

In 1958, she began to pursue a formal arts education when she enrolled at the Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. Her studies were interrupted over the next two decades as she worked to support herself and her family, including her son, Neal Ambrose-Smith. Smith ultimately received a Bachelor of Arts in Art Education from Framingham State College in Massachusetts in 1976, and two years later, she earned a Master’s degree in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, where she ultimately settled.

During this period, she founded the Grey Canyon group of Native American contemporary artists — a collective that exhibited their work on local, national, and international scales. Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, Smith curated many major exhibitions centering the works of young Native American artists, endeavors that are as much a part of her legacy as her own practice. 

“I’m so grateful for Jaune’s work as an artist, but even more so as a curator and promoter of other artists,” Zach Feuer, a Hyperallergic contributor who co-founded the Forge Project and currently works as the director for the Gochman Family Collection of Native contemporary art. 

“Jaune did more than crack the buckskin ceiling; she’s built the foundation for a new world,” Feuer continued.

In 1992, as the United States government planned celebrations commemorating the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Smith confronted the legacies of Native colonization and genocide, environmental destruction, and contamination of goods through her Trade Canoe series, which layered collaged historic photographs, zoological illustrations, and newspaper clippings with paint and objects. The technique of collage, in addition to her well-known cartographic series that reimagined US state maps to recenter the presence of Indigenous communities, would become quintessential throughout the rest of her artistic practice. These approaches merge in works like “State Names” (2000), in which paint drippings and newspaper clips obscure state names that originate from European colonizers and highlight those with Indigenous roots.

Since the late ’70s, Smith has been spotlighted in over 50 solo exhibitions, including a major 2023 retrospective organized at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map. In 2020, she became the first Native American artist to enter the National Gallery of Art’s (NGA) collection when the museum acquired her painting “I See Red: Target” (1992). 

Smith also curated more than 30 shows, including The Land Carries Our Ancestors at the NGA in 2023, the museum’s first exhibition organized by an artist and its first show of Native art in three decades. The most recent exhibition Smith curated, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always, opens on Saturday at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Jersey and highlights the work of 90 living artists spanning over 50 Indigenous nations and communities across North America.

In addition to her art and curatorial practice, Smith is also known for her commitment to land and cultural preservation efforts, which have reportedly helped save Albuquerque’s Petroglyph National Monument and Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). One of her last initiatives was the establishment of the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Memorial Scholarship to support future generations of Indigenous artists and cultural workers at the IAIA.

“There are people who carry our collective pain and mourning for us so we can move forward. It is a huge sacrifice,” Patricia Marroquin Norby (Purépecha), associate curator of Native American Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, wrote in an essay for Smith’s Whitney Museum retrospective. 

“Smith’s images bear witness,” Norby continued. “They are a recounting of truths, creative acts carried out for all of us. She only asks us not to forget, to sharpen our minds, to resist, to remember the impact of the last battle. She reminds us what is sacred.”