Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was a Native American artist, activist, and curator who used her work to explore Native American identity and the United States’ history of oppressing indigenous people.
- Died: January 24, 2025 (Who else died on January 24?)
- Details of death: Died in Corrales, New Mexico of pancreatic cancer at the age of 85.
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Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s legacy
Born at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on a Native American reservation, Smith and the works she created were deeply connected to the indigenous experience in the United States. Calling the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation in Montana her home, she knew from an early age she wanted to be an artist. After earning degrees from Olympic College in Washington and Framingham State College in Massachusetts, Smith landed an exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery in New York City. It was positively reviewed by Art in America, helping gain her entry into graduate school at the University of New Mexico and launch her decades-long career.
Smith’s work incorporated mixed media, often using maps, photographs, and other visual media merged with oil paints in order to make larger statements about the world. Through it, she explored environmental issues and Native American identity, as well as the United States’ long history of oppressing indigenous peoples and how that history has rippled through to the modern day. Projects such as her long-running “I See Red” series were often confrontational works that forced viewers to confront the complex history she explored.
In 2023, her exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art became the museum’s first-ever retrospective devoted to a Native American artist. The exhibition ended up traveling to other notable museums, including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas and the Seattle Art Museum. For years, she also curated exhibitions of work by other indigenous artists, such as 2023-’24’s “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” at Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art.
Smith’s long list of honors includes the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement prize; the College Art Association Committee on Women in the Arts Award; New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts; The Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award; four honorary doctorates, and many others.
Her work has been displayed in galleries throughout the world, including the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Museum of Modern Art in Quito, Ecuador; the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York, and D.C.’s Smithsonian American Art Museum.
Notable quote
“I have a worldview, and it’s Native, it’s Indigenous.” — interview with BOMB magazine, 2023
Tributes to Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Full obituary: The Art Newspaper
