Remembering Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940 - 2025)

An overview of the work and legacy of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a prominent Native artist who gained critical attention and challenged institutionalized stereotypes of Native identity.

Remember Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940 – 2025)

Our days are filled with confusion, scrutiny, and reflection. During these times, a seminal Native artist, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith passed. Her work influenced generations as her career spanned 50 years. Setting cultural and political analysis aside for a moment, I thought it would be helpful for us all to recompose ourselves, discuss art, and see how humanity is still alive.

Juane Quick-to-See Smith

Teaching Quick-to-See Smith

I was a youthful post-doctoral graduate seeking stable employment in the academy to continue my desired interest in academic growth. A position was posted at a local college to teach Native American art history and analysis. Thumbing through materials with a heavy breath of fear, I braved the step forward in applying for the position. Weeks of deliberation passed, and then the call came offering me the position. My hook on securing the position is my analysis of contemporary Native art/artists.

Throughout those years, I continued to use Fritz Scholder, James Luna, Wendy Red Star, Kent Monkman, and Juane Quick-to-See Smith. Students were captured by the impressive artistic expressions of these collected Native artists. Most of the students held stereotyped images of Native People by non-Native American artists — think Edward Curtis photographs or the “End of the Trail” statue by James Earle Fraser.

Edward Curtis

James Earle Fraser, “End of the Trail”

What those same students were introduced to was the living agency of Native art as an expressive location of cultures, sovereignty, and tribal socio-political resistance.

Wendy Rose

The Impact Of The Paint

“I look at line, form, color, texture, in contemporary art as well as viewing old Indian artifacts the same way. With this I make parallels from the old world to contemporary art. A Hunkpapa drum becomes a Mark Rothko painting; ledger book symbols become Cy Twomblys; a Naskaspi bag is a Paul Klee; a Blackfoot robe, Agnes Martin; beadwork color is Josef Albers; a parfleche is Frank Stella” (Quick-to-See, interview, 1982).

In her own words, Quick-to-See Smith defines the core direction of contemporary Native art. Bringing together elements from the large non-Native art culture within the sphere of Native influence, Native artists project a discourse of resistance to hyper-stereotypes and historic tropes. Assimilation strategies in the 1950s took advantage of art education to teach Native students how “not to be Indian.” The core principle for this education curriculum was that inside each Native American, there was an artistic ability. All that was needed was to dig deep enough inside the impressionable (and forcibly removed from their home and family) Native American students, provide them with art tools, introduce them to high Western European art, and allow them creative license to create. For some coming through Dorothy Dunn’s art education studios in the Southwest, this was possible. For the vast majority, it was not. Capitalizing on the success of the limited Native art students, America and the world at large were introduced to “traditional” Native American art. The productions were not quite “traditional” from a tribal perspective. They were visually appealing to the buying non-Native audiences and galleries. Fame was given to the American educator Dorothy Dunn, with little attention given to the Native artists themselves. Harrison Begay, Pablita Velarde, and Allan Houser rose to notoriety in their post-Dunn years. Establishing the “Southwest Studio Style,” these artists would go on to inspire future generations of Native artists who would themselves push the limited American understanding of Native art through discursive re-working of cast Native images, stereotypes, gender bias, and cultural extermination.

Seeing Beyond The Modern

Juane Quick-to-See Smith used humor, satire, and stylistic inversions of contemporary art trends within her works. Inviting these non-Native techniques to be included in her work, Quick-to-See Smith turned the eye to how the large non-Native art community viewed contemporary Native art. Her methodologies were not specific to her trajectory. It was her keen eye on how to interrogate situated Native iconic images multiplied and diluted through the grand American psyche to express an updated vehicle of Native expression. She was a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nations, yet her works expanded a lexicon of Native metaphors and relations.

Playing with what Fritz Scholder coined the “lush, plastic, licorice-like” paint, Quick-to-See Smith gave life to dripping lines in a semiotic manner. The two-dimensionality of paintings can minimize the potent semiotics of the subject. Her work broadly embraces these limits almost as a teasing welcome to those unfamiliar with contemporary Native art. Closer attention broadcasts the deep-seated satire and gestures back against a colonial gaze.

Her self-appointed title as a “cultural arts worker” allowed Quick-to-See Smith to work as an educator, curator, and independent artist. In each of these positions, her commentary on the commodification of Native art looms subtle and loud. This manner of operation underscored her artistic vocabulary, making her work stand on its own merits in line with her Native and non-Native art contemporaries.

Juane Quick-to-See Smith

Seeing Is Speaking

“In 1992 I created a series of works titled I See Red to remind viewers that Native Americans are still alive,” she told Sims. “This is always my interest, even though I’m collaging things like old photographs and 1930s fruit labels on the surfaces of these paintings. But then there are also newspaper articles about current events. So there’s a historical continuity from something in the past, up to the present” (Juane Quick-to-See, interview, Whitney Museum).

Remaining a bold voice current and evolving with the changing current of socio-political issues, Quick-to-See Smith sheds light across fixed and fuzzy cultural borders. She was the first to curate a show at the National Gallery of Art (NGA), The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (2023). Her work as a curator echoed that of her productions, stunning, blatant, subtle, humorous, and critical.

Juane Quick-to-See Smith passed away on Jan. 24, 2025, of pancreatic cancer. She was 85 years old.

Alan Lechusza

Original publication, February 2025

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