Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an artist and curator who blazed a path for Native Americans in the contemporary art world, deftly exploring themes of Indigenous identity, ecological destruction, and imperial conquest while infusing her work with satire and wit, died Jan. 24 at her home in Corrales, N.M. She was 85.
Her death was announced by the Garth Greenan Gallery in Manhattan, which represented her. She had pancreatic cancer, the gallery said.
Ms. Smith was among the country’s most renowned Native artists, crafting pieces that incorporated Indigenous images and motifs — tepees, totem poles, the trickster figure Coyote — as well as modern art techniques drawn from American masters including Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Bridging those two worlds, she once said, was “like being able to speak two languages and find the word that is common to both.”
While favoring an earthy palette of reds, yellows, oranges, and greens, Ms. Smith made drawings, paintings, sculptures, and collages that had “a sharp political and cultural edge,” as Washington Post art critic Philip Kennicott wrote in 2023, but were “also sumptuous and visually enticing.”
One of her early sculptures, “Indian Madonna Enthroned” (1974), was a riff on the Italian Renaissance Madonnas she had been studying in art school, constructed as a kind of three-dimensional collage. She crafted a Native figure with pheasant wings for hands and a dried corn cob for a heart, seated on a wooden chair with an American flag and a copy of Vine Deloria Jr.’s “God Is Red,” a landmark study of Native American religious views.
Ms. Smith went on to treat her canvases as large-scale collages, incorporating photographs, wire mesh, muslin, and calico into her paintings. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg, she also used newspaper clippings, gluing them to the canvas and dripping or layering paint on top in works such as 1992’s “Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People),” a 14-foot-wide painting of a canoe that she created in response to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Americas. Atop the piece was a chain hung with 31 objects seemingly offered up for trade, including toy tomahawks, Red Man chewing tobacco, and a Washington Redskins hat.
The painting had a liberating effect on Indigenous artists, according to Jeffrey Gibson, a painter and sculptor with Choctaw-Cherokee lineage, who praised Ms. Smith for demonstrating how it was possible to be a Native American artist, activist, and educator all at once. “You need a unified model of how someone can be the same person in all those spaces,” he told The New York Times in 2023. “Jaune has provided that for me.”
Ms. Smith recalled that at the outset of her career in the 1970s, “nobody knew what contemporary Native art was.” Her own work was considered inauthentic by dealers and curators who seemed more interested in woven blankets and silver jewelry.
Gradually, attitudes shifted as Native artists made inroads at galleries and museums, in part through her efforts. On her own or with others, she curated more than 30 exhibitions, highlighting the work of Native American artists in shows including “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage,” which opened at the American Indian Community House in Manhattan and toured for two years.
In 2020, Ms. Smith broke “the buckskin ceiling,” as she put it, by becoming the first Native American artist to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington: “Target” (1992), an 11-foot-tall painting that includes clippings, a Redskins pennant, and a Son of Tomahawk comic book cover. Currently on display in the museum’s East Building, the work is layered with stripes of blood-red paint and topped with a dart board — a nod to Johns’s 1950s “Target” pieces — with darts arranged to resemble the feathers in a Native headdress.
Ms. Smith curated the museum’s 2023 exhibition “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” which featured the work of nearly 50 living Native artists and marked the National Gallery’s first artist-curated exhibition, and its first exhibition of Native artists in three decades. That same year, she became the first Native American to have a solo retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
“I don’t know how long this is going to last, it’s like manna from heaven,” she told Harper’s Bazaar at the time, crediting the Black Lives Matter movement and Standing Rock pipeline protests with spurring new interest in Native art and artists. “But I’m doing it, and I’ll keep doing it if I can get the door cracked so that I can bring my community in with me.”
Ms. Smith said she was conceived when her mother was 14 and her father was 40. Her mother left after the birth of Ms. Smith’s younger sister, and the two girls were raised by their father, a horse trader whose work took the family across the Pacific Northwest.
According to Smith, they often lived without furniture, indoor plumbing, or electricity and “had to go to the garbage bins for food.” Much of her childhood was spent working at canneries and farms, picking berries in the spring and string beans in the fall. She found a refuge in books — at age 7, she began hiding in trees so that she could read volumes she borrowed from a roving bookmobile — and in art.
“My father would draw little pictures of animals that I would carry in my pockets,” she recalled in a video interview for the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Besides reading books, it took me into a place that didn’t have violence in it, didn’t have hunger, was just the most wonderful place to be.”
Smith began her art education at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., breaking from school at times to work and support herself. She continued her training despite skepticism from an early professor who told her, according to Ms. Smith, that she could “draw better than the men” but needed to find another profession because “women are not artists.”
After receiving an associate’s degree in 1960, she had children and supported her growing family as a waitress, janitor, and cannery worker, according to a New York magazine profile. She sold her first piece of art for $45 and eventually went back to school, earning a bachelor’s degree in art education in 1976 from Framingham State College (now university) in Massachusetts. Four years later, she received a master’s degree in visual arts from the University of New Mexico Albuquerque, the city that became her longtime home.
Ms. Smith helped start an Indigenous artists collective, Grey Canyon, and joined a successful effort to save what is now Petroglyph National Monument, where rock art was being threatened by real estate development on the outskirts of Albuquerque.
Her later projects included a series of stylized maps of America, which explored issues around Native sovereignty and statehood, and a 1991 series titled “Paper Dolls for a Post Columbian World,” which featured a pair of cheekily named characters — Barbie Plenty Horses and her partner, Ken — along with satirical dress-up outfits, like a set of “matching smallpox suits” and a “maid’s uniform” worn “for cleaning houses of white people.”
Survivors include her husband, Andy Ambrose; three children, Bill and Roxanne Ambrose and Neal Ambrose-Smith, an artist with whom she often collaborated; and seven grandchildren.
Her latest curatorial project, “Indigenous Identities,” a group show featuring the work of 97 living Indigenous artists, opened Feb. 1 at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University. Nearby is an exhibition of her own work, with a title that reflected Smith’s general approach to art: “Hope With Humor.”
“Perhaps the preeminent issue in the Indian world is plain survival,” the museum quoted her as saying. “Beyond that it means retaining our own cultures, governments, languages, religions, and ceremonies. … I am telling stories about hope with humor. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have hope.”
