Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025)

The artist, curator, educator and provocateur Jaune Quick-to-See Smith FIG.1 died on 24th January 2025, ten days after her eighty-fifth birthday, at her home in Corrales, New Mexico, surrounded by her family.¹ At rest now, she always had work to do in her studio, in her curatorial practice and as an advocate for Indigenous artists. For those who knew her, it was not surprising to learn that she was in her studio on her last day. Just after her death, her largest curatorial project, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always FIG.2, opened at Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick (1st February–21st December 2025). An accompanying catalogue will follow, as will a volume titled Native American Contemporary Art, to be published by Thames & Hudson. These projects represent decades of her most persistent work in acknowledging the boundless creativity of contemporary Indigenous artists.

Jaune was the hardest-working and most generous artist I have known. The first time I saw her speak was at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington. I was eager to hear her talk about the museum’s recent acquisition of her painting, Indian, Indio, Indigenous FIG.3. Instead, she spoke for forty-five minutes about the work of numerous Native artists, before even mentioning that she was an artist herself. The last time we spoke, she encouraged me to add two young artists, who had just come to her attention, to the chapter I was writing for her forthcoming publication. Jaune was an astute historian and curator who always carried news of other artists with her, wherever she travelled. She said it best: ‘My art, my life experience and my tribal ties are totally enmeshed. I go from one community with messages from the other, and I try to enlighten people’.²

Jaune’s advocacy began when she undertook a Bachelor of Arts at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, in 1976, where she collaborated with fellow students. Known as the Grey Canyon Group, they exhibited together more than a dozen times first in New Mexico and then in New York at the American Indian Community House in 1979.³ In the same year, Jaune staged her first solo show at Kornblee Gallery, New York, which was reviewed in Art in America and the Village Voice. In 1985 she organised the travelling exhibition and catalogue Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage FIG.4 with the artist Harmony Hammond (b.1944), which included the work of twenty-nine Indigenous artists. To the end, she was adamant: ‘I am not one. I am one among many. My community comes with me. This is how it’s always been since time immemorial. This is how we’ve survived’.⁴ These early efforts to earn recognition for Native artists blossomed into a curatorial career that saw her organise more than thirty exhibitions. Jaune always leveraged her prodigious reputation to encourage and support other artists, especially the youngest of them.

Jaune’s art practice was shaped by political discourse around the land of the United States and Indigenous history and rights, while directly confronting the violence of the American government. But when she was in her studio, she was driven by an aesthetic will to capture an audience and sustain their attention. ‘My work is a diary or journal of my life. It starts with a message, it has layered meanings, but I like to bring the viewer in with a seductive texture, a beautiful drawing and then let them have one of my messages’.⁵ Begun just five years after she earned her Master’s in Art at the University of New Mexico in 1980, her Petroglyph Park series (1985–87) exemplifies her rigorous and extraordinary efforts to educate audiences about the millennia of Indigenous life along the Rio Grande. She worked on several canvases simultaneously, moving between them to compose edge-to-edge abstractions ablaze with grounds of colour, laid down in gestural passages and overpainted with figures and signs of life. Each canvas visualises the perpetually inhabited and contested land of New Mexico, with expressive compositions, such as The Court House Steps FIG.5, forming a visual summation of Indigenous campaigns to preserve their cultural heritage.

I gathered paintings from that series for the 2012 exhibition Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Landscapes of an American Modernist at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, to demonstrate her contribution to the canon of American landscapes. Her brilliant palette was at home among O’Keeffe’s well-known œuvre. It was my intention to distinguish Jaune’s disruptive signs of a populated and unsettled land as a conspicuous corrective to the artfully depopulated vistas imagined by such modernists as O’Keeffe. Jaune leaves a profound legacy of art and action, encapsulated by prolific series that reflect her brilliant and irreverent imagination, intentionally honed for political communication. Each was composed as a political speech intended to challenge dominant historical narratives, informed by her Indigenous viewpoint and the disciplined, educated gaze with which she viewed art history. Examples include Prince William Sound (1991), a collage with text from the Chief Seattle series; Tongass Trade Canoe FIG.6, an installation from her canoe series; and Imperialism (2011), from the War and Water series. Each expanded the vocabulary of American art through Indigenous interpretations of colonial claims on the continent.

In 2023 the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, honoured Jaune’s artistic and political fury with a retrospective, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, their first solo exhibition of a Native American artist.⁶ The 130 works of art on view showcased her expertise and dexterity as an extravagant colourist and expressionist in oil, acrylic, pastel and ink. Red was a prominent hue throughout the galleries – a demonstration of its importance as a strategic metaphor in the artist’s materially agitated and rhetorically fraught practice. For Jaune, the colour signified both proud identity – as seen in Red Mean: Self-Portrait (1993) – and demeaning label, for example in Target (1992). Most significantly, red was a metonym for the horrors of violence against Indigenous peoples.⁷ Blood-red ink was also the unifying aesthetic of her monotype series Custer FIG.7, which the curator of Memory Map, Laura Phipps, installed in a salon-style hang.⁸ Reversing the bodily violation of conquest that is ever-present in any tribal history, the artist engaged with the crushing defeat delivered to George Armstrong Custer by a strategic coalition of Indian tribes in 1876. With humour, she deployed the tactical force of her art to defile the general’s authority as pictured in a nineteenth-century photogravure.⁹

In the same year as her retrospective, Jaune realised her most important curatorial project, becoming the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The Land Carries Our Ancestors was also the first to feature Indigenous artists, marking a significant milestone for both Jaune and the nearly ninety-year-old institution.¹⁰ Jaune’s art and exhibitions always had work to do; her aesthetic passions were as strong as her opinions, driven by her eternally optimistic belief in the power of art to change human consciousness.