Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born 1940) is a Salish-Kootenai artist from the Flathead Reservation in Montana who became one of the founding figures of the contemporary Indigenous art movement in America - and, more broadly, one of the most important American artists of the past half-century. Her connections to New Mexico and the Southwest are deep and sustained: she has exhibited widely in Albuquerque and Santa Fe, maintained close relationships with the artists and institutions of the region, and drawn on the deep Indigenous cultural heritage of the Southwest in her ongoing engagement with questions of land, sovereignty, and survival. Her mixed-media paintings combine gestural abstraction - raw, energetic mark-making in the tradition of Abstract Expressionism - with stenciled text, newspaper fragments, found imagery, and direct political statement. The works address land rights, Indigenous sovereignty, environmental destruction, the violence of American history, and the ongoing legacies of colonialism, often with a wit and anger that refuses to let the viewer off easily. A painting may be beautiful and funny and deeply disturbing all at once: a landscape interrupted by text, a familiar image undercut by historical context, a collaged newspaper clipping that changes everything. Beyond her studio practice, Quick-to-See Smith has been a crucial curator, organizer, and advocate. She founded the Coup Marks artist group in the 1970s to create exhibition opportunities for Native American artists, and worked for decades to bring Indigenous art to national and international attention at a time when major institutions were slow to recognize it. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women's Caucus for Art, the Smithsonian's James Smithson Bicentennial Medal, and numerous other honors. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, and dozens of other major institutions worldwide.