Montana Indigenous artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's boundary-breaking year (2024)

One of the most prominent artists from western Montana has had a precedent-setting year, exhibiting her work and curating in major museums.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, has long been well-known in the Montana art community. Her work, expressionistic and politically charged and steeped in Indigenous imagery and issues, has reached a yet larger audience through a retrospective, “Memory Map,” which covers nearly 50 years, signaling to the art world the importance of the work she’s been making into her 80s.

"Memory Map" originated at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, one of the country’s most significant art institutions.

It’s a first in several categories, according to Laura Millin, executive director of the Missoula Art Museum, who’s known and collaborated with the artist for decades. Quick-to-See Smith is “the first Native American artist and first Native woman artist to be featured with a retrospective at the Whitney (or any other major museum in New York City). Millin called it "breaking the buckskin ceiling."

"Jaune is a radical influencer and is contributing broadly to the rewriting of history by upending long-held prejudices about Indigenous people and culture and by forcing reappraisals of the historical record," she wrote.

After the Whitney, the retrospective traveled to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas. Last year it opened in the Seattle Art Museum’s sprawling special exhibitions wing, which could provide breathing room for the nearly 150 works, including paintings, drawings, sculptures and more. That exhibition closed earlier this month.

While artists from the Treasure State have exhibited at major institutions, a traveling retrospective originating at the Whitney is unique, according to Brandon Reintjes, the senior curator of the MAM.

He said you could view the recognition as “an upholding of contemporary Indigenous artists in general, and second, to Jaune specifically.”

“She’s had an amazing career and been so influential to so many artists,” Reintjes wrote. "Her activities, from writing to curating, to supporting young artists and celebrating established artists' successes is astounding when you also consider her individual output."

Now based out of New Mexico, Smith has maintained ties to western Montana. Her last solo exhibition in Missoula was in 2017 at the MAM, which she’s had a long affiliation with. She helped found its collection of contemporary American Indian art in 1997 with a donation of 31 prints, three of which were loaned for the Whitney exhibition. The MAM also holds five of her paintings and eight drawings/collages.

Quick-to-See Smith answered questions via email. The exchange has been condensed for length and clarity.

Q: We tend to see our work differently in hindsight, whether it’s a day, a month or a decade. In this yearslong process of planning the retrospective and combing through 50 years of work, did you have any insights into your way of working or thinking about art or specific issues that hadn’t occurred to you when you were making them?

A: Whitney curator Laura Phipps said we had an embarrassment of riches. Of course, I still owned a lot of work, too, that had never sold. I didn’t really think about that aspect of the work until the end when we were in curatorial meetings and faced with how the exhibition would present the work. Chronologically was always an option, but Laura wanted to create rooms that had subject matter, although it was clear that land, land issues (and) the natural world rose to the forefront in almost all the work and nearly always with humor. I used a lot of newspaper titles to make humorous statements about everything. There were works about war or anti-war, human rights, animal rights, but generally the work is about the environment and nearly everything leads back to my tribe (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). Maybe I was surprised that no matter how I painted a painting or made a drawing, I still was consistent in my ideology. That’s why the map on the cover of the catalog is so perfect because it displays a U.S. map that radiates from the tribe with line work in sort of a doppler effect. It shows that no matter where I travel or where I go that I am always tethered to the tribe. I was born at the (St. Ignatius) Mission and I plan on becoming part of the DNA of the red winged blackbirds, the magpies and Coyote at the end.

Q: The show spotlights numerous series that you’ve developed over the years, including the “Memory Maps” prominently displayed near the entrance. What was the initial spark for this series?

A: In college, I was led to believe that the U.S. map belonged to an artist in N.Y. who painted them in various ways but not with any content. I felt the maps were abstract reminders of the stolen land and that I did have many things to say so I was using the image of the map in a different way and that it could convey information, something like a message board. There were many things to say about the country and many things that demonstrate a cheeky side with lots of humor, too. Messages about American mainstream culture are often in opposition to a Native worldview which led me to use tribal icon(s) that are easy to identify. But the things I had to say are reminders that sometimes give viewers pause and maybe think about nature or war or animal rights in another way — or not, that’s their prerogative. I’m not preachy. I am actually turning notions we have upside down or backwards or so we can see a flip side.

Q: In the past, you’ve mentioned influences such as abstract artists like Robert Rauschenberg, Willem de Kooning and Jasper Johns. Could you tell me about the early phase of your career when you were exploring ways to draw on their work alongside Indigenous ones? Were there older Native artists working in this fashion already that you could model after, or were you finding your own way?

A: We didn’t have any Native artists presented in our art history classes. We had to seek them out ourselves. I was going to school at a teacher’s college in New England and I wrote to Fritz Scholder through his N.Y. gallery where I had seen his first show. He kindly wrote back to me with some cards and brochures. I doubt that he had a catalog at that time. Later, of course, he had quite a few catalogs. The teachers had never heard of him. But having seen his show in N.Y. I was so excited over his painting and his subject matter. The above artists you mentioned were the ones who were available for us to study and Helen Frankenthaler and Georgia O’Keeffe were the only women presented in art history. It was all white men. I would say that Rauschenberg had the most appeal because he was a dumpster diver using detritus in his paintings and being poor, having no money for art supplies, his work gave me permission to use whatever I could find to make work.

The only other place I could find Indigenous work was in museums like the Metropolitan in N.Y. where it was all antiquities. Honest, there were no books or catalogs of Native art at that time other than an anthropology book or two in a library. Remember — I am the first Native to have a retrospective in a major New York Museum in any New York or Brooklyn museum or the surrounding area. At the same time, right after my retrospective opened, a group Indigenous exhibition, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” opened at the National Gallery of Art that I curated. The first Native exhibition in that museum, the first Native curator and with a large catalog featuring 50 living Native artists and essays by three Native writers Heather Ahtone (Chickasaw/Choctaw), Shana Bushyhead Condill (Eastern Band Cherokee), and me. We are helping to make more books about Native artists.

Q: The National Gallery of Art exhibition that you curated includes work by a younger generation of artists who also pull influences from myriad sources and styles and don’t easily fit into a single category. What do you think of this current moment, where artists like Nicholas Galanin, Raven Halfmoon and others are reaching wide audiences and in some cases moving freely between mediums?

A: These artists are doing what they should be doing, grabbing every opportunity to make work and exhibit work, all while they’re young, spirited creators. I support their successes and I am their fan club. Most of them know because when they receive an award or open a show, I send them kudos telling them how happy they make me.

Q: The show includes materials related to early collectives like the Grey Canyon Artists. What was the response to Indigenous contemporary art you and your colleagues were making at the time? From your perspective, were there tipping points that led us to the current moment of wider visibility?

A: We had many who questioned the authenticity of our art. Like, if you didn’t learn at home at the kitchen table, well, you cannot be making authentic Indian art. Yes, we were able to go to college and make art from our hearts, heavily influenced by our tribes. I founded the Grey Canyon Artists in Albuquerque and Coup Marks at CSKT and I started the (Phoenix) Heard Museum’s Biennial so that Natives who made contemporary art from their life experiences and tribal backgrounds could show at the Heard.

Later I suggested the same thing to Jennifer Mcnu*tt at the Eiteljorg as a way of presenting contemporary art by Natives to their museum audience. The Heard no longer does the Heard Biennial but the Eiteljorg is still going strong, now under the oversight of Dorene Red Cloud. These organizations were game changers in the Indian world in giving us more latitude to show contemporary art. I also worked here in Montana with the Stewart sisters, Susan and Kathy (Blackfeet and Crow), and the MICA (Montana Indian Contemporary Art).

I had seen many white artists making in situ art outdoors and I wanted to do the same with a group of Native artists. I was sure there would be a difference and sure enough there was. The biggest thing we did was an event at Salish Kootenai College, in bringing the contemporary artists together with our traditional artists and our premier poet Vic Charlo. We made art installations outdoors all weekend, ate together in the cafeteria and Vic read to us while we ate. Oh my gosh, I get goosebumps when I think about our communities being together making art outdoors using fabric, string, willow twigs, ice, knapweed and the installations were cultural storytelling.

Q: Landscape art remains a popular genre, although it’s now even more prevalent through social media and photography. In the Western version, though, it might be nostalgic (for those painters still working in that lineage) or avoid including a human presence at all. Through projects like the Kalispell series and the Memory Map, you’ve taken a different tack that emphasizes the Native cultures who called it home. Could you tell me about the way you decided to approach land or landscape in your work?

A: Because of Native animism and our involving science in everything we do, we study the plants, animals, insects, all flying things, our traditional world is holistic — from the groundwater recharge to the cosmos, we generally see landscape in art in a different, circular way because of the seasons which also gives us “Indian Time” that people make fun of, but it’s a reality of life, nothing to do with the corporate world, the industrial world, that is a different sense of time. But for my family and our tribe and our ways of harvesting food, we are attentive to the seasons as cyclical time. I can say that when we draw or paint a landscape you will rarely see a horizon line and you see that presented in my work all through the Whitney retrospective.

Also, you see figures from petroglyphs and pictographs that maybe are from the spirit world. We have that in our lives. Vine Deloria, Dan Wildcat, Leroy Little Bear and Joy Harjo, just a few of our authors today talk about it in their books. This gives us a way of beginning to deal with the two-world system we are subjected to, which is the industrial world of the corporations and developers, and then maintain our own spiritual world that is so ingrained in the natural world. What people don’t realize is that our way of thinking may have the solutions for saving the planet. Indigenous peoples around the world are all saying to include us in helping to solve the problems the industrial world is laying on us today with their constant extractions of all resources and killing wildlife.

Q: Your work addresses issues directly, including racism against Native Americans in this country. What was the reception in the art world to a piece like 1992’s “I See Red: Snowman” at the time?

A: Oh, I’m sure my art has been scaring people for at least 30 years if not longer. Well sure, the “Indian Madonna” was 50 years ago, she was plenty scary. I know the Forest Service removed my paper dolls because they offended some people. Yet the story of “Barbie and Ken Plenty Horses” is the story of my family when the military kidnapped my aunties and uncles to take them to the Catholic school in Mission. One of the genocidal plans of the U.S. government was to “kill the Indian and save the man.” It was about sending our families to white schools where they rid our families of their languages, cut their hair and their idea of teaching our families was to train them to become slaves in white households in Missoula. My paper dolls tell a real story about my family and my tribe. I even designed smallpox suits that fit every member of the family — this was based on the history my father told me about smallpox coming in trade blankets that the government sent out to us, also a part of their genocidal program. I tell people, “I am a miracle, I am here.”

Q: Many pieces have been collaborations with your son, Neal Ambrose-Smith (who teaches at the Institute for American Indian Arts). What’s the working process like with him as a collaborator?

A: We’ve been making things together since he was a little kid, now he is sometimes my teacher, showing me how to do something. We both do our own paintings in our own studios, but if I want to work on sculpture I need his help as a fabricator, but it becomes larger than that as we work out ideas together. He is really creative and draws better than me, so I respect his ideas. Today, he taught me about what happens when you put gloss and matte medium over acrylic, but it became very technical about platelets so I can’t tell you what he said except that it made my painting look better.

Q: This exhibition and your curation project at the National Gallery of Art have given you a large platform with major institutions. Have you had any discussions with them about how they and other museums present Indigenous art in the future or how to leverage this momentum?

A: I am ever the teacher, so any institution that I can infiltrate, I will offer them teaching moments that enlighten their institution and of course, try to change them forever to offer more gender parity and include BIPOC.

Q: You’ve now taken this exhibition to three museums across the country. What are some of the most meaningful experiences you’re walking away with?

A: That these museums all said, “this was wonderful, we would like to feature more Native artists.” Well, yippee, it should have happened long ago, but as the old saying goes, better late than never. My hope is that they follow up on this comment and make it a bona fide commitment.