Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is what author and journalist Gail Sheehy called “a triumphant personality,” someone who has seen off circumstances that would have extinguished lesser lights. Born to a 14-year-old mother and a much older father in a Jesuit mission on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, she was destined to scoop up the learning of the ages, reduce it to its elemental inspiration drawn from deep inside the earth, then apply the panache of 20th-century painting to produce work as original as it is wise, as universal as it is anchored in the visual language of someone with plenty to say.
On view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” is an exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures first assembled by curator Laura Phipps at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.
The point, Smith says while leading a group through the Modern show, is to declare, “We’re still here. … We live everywhere in the U.S., if not on a reservation then in a community.” Operating from an overflowing well of extraverted energy, her tiny frame dressed in black, from a Western hat with beaded band to sleek pants and boots, she makes a strenuous yet easy effort for the people around her. Indeed, to get Smith on the phone, as I did for an interview, is to hear a voice of such animated warmth that it seems suddenly the sun has appeared, promising a lovely encounter.
One might think a disposition as radiant as hers would come from an enchanted life. Not so. “As a kid, life was so tough,” she says. “I knew right away how white people were treated differently from Indigenous people. … Life is pretty scary.” After her mother left the family when Jaune and her sister were young, the girls lived with their father, moving from reservation to reservation as he traded horses for a living.
In time, Jaune was working, too, at any job available, including alongside migrant farm laborers in California. “They are related to me,” she says. “They are Indigenous, too.”
She hasn’t forgotten how the federal government “stole land, took land … millions of acres” owned in several Western states by her tribe, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, and gave in return a fraction of those holdings in the form of a reservation. The tribe had property in Canada, too, and there, “It was like a lobotomy,” she says. “You take away food, you take away clothing, you take away culture.
It’s happening in Ukraine. … It could happen here. We must be wise, [live] carefully, stay alert.”
Smith has always been alert and determined. After zig-zagging across the country from a community college in Washington state to a teachers’ college in Massachusetts (she was told she could teach art but not practice it, not as a woman and, especially, not as a Native American woman) to the University of New Mexico, which did not admit her until after three tries. By then, she already was gaining recognition for her work in New York.
Neal Ambrose-Smith, Jaune’s son, also an artist, is with her in Fort Worth. His mother, he observes, “keeps going to the next door to find one that opens. She is not held back by closed doors.” Nor is she held back by previous, successful styles of making art. From a 1974 self-portrait of breathtaking power and beauty, she moved to abstraction over the next five years, arriving at pictures that only hint at her inner convictions with an occasional horse or canoe dropped in as a reference to her background. But in time the canvases grew larger, their authority more assured, till finally Jaune took a look and pronounced them “not political enough, not saying enough.”
Then began collages not only with fabric as before, but also newspapers, lightbulbs, baseball caps, and some with the sayings of Chief Seattle from 1854 (“The air is precious — for all things share the same breath, the animals, the plants and the humans”), others with her own commentary on capitalism and the corruption of modern culture (“Clear Cut Choice,” “Fusion Illusion?,” “Bedeviled by Ethnicity.”)
Jaune is a master printmaker, and during a week at the University of North Texas in 2002 she produced War Is Heck, dramatized by a horse, unremarkable enough, but surrounded by unlikely ironic images such as what appears to be a male Native American dancer winged like an angel; several buffalo, going from benign to aggressive, lined up like postage stamps; a quartet of American flags, small, discreet, nothing like the flag paintings Smith borrowed from Jasper Johns and put to devastating service illustrating the lands and petroglyphs of the earliest Native Americans, the products and slogans of modern Americans and more.
Before that piece came a satirical series of prints featuring Gen. George Armstrong Custer. With one of him lying down, another upside down, another still with a Magritte pipe, they echo a screen-print by Andy Warhol, but Smith’s interpretations are so murderously witty that they bring to mind Gloria Steinem’s masterful uses of ridicule.
Then there’s the trade canoe made by Jaune and Neal. It’s suspended from the ceiling and loaded with Styrofoam objects like Starbucks coffee cups and takeout containers, hypodermic needles and wooden crosses, all coated in red ocher. For me, it’s the centerpiece of the show.
It could be said that with this retrospective, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is coming into her own. But she has been coming into her own for most of her 83 years, just more forcefully with each iteration.
Details
“Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” continues through Jan. 21 , 2024, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth. Open Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tickets are $16 for adults; $12 for seniors 60 and over, active and retired military personnel and first responders with ID; $10 for students with ID; and free for those under 18. themodern.org