Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Tierra Madre @ Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 

Tierra Madre

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

May 1 – June 20, 2025

Garth Greenan Gallery announced Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Tierra Madre, an exhibition of works on paper, paintings, and one large-scale sculpture at 545 West 20th Street.The solo exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery since her death in January of this year. The show features a selection of drawings from the mid-’90s that harken back to the artist’s childhood, as well as a series of paintings that engaged her up to her final weeks.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s twelve-foot bronze, Trade Canoe: Making Medicine II (2024–2025), is the last of a series she first began, in painting form, in the early-’90s. Smith recalled accounts of older Native Americans scarred from the “gifts,” like blankets, brought by settlers in canoes. It was under the guise of trade that these settlers dealt many of their deadliest blows, from smallpox to land expropriation. In the work, these barbed gifts—from syrup-flavored coffees to Christian sacramentals—are piled into a final canoe for symbolic return.

In Memories of Childhood #10 (1994), Smith foregrounds a charcoal drawing of a child. Her fingerpainted rainbow is declared “state of the art” by a nearby newspaper clipping. Smith honed her iconic mixing of text and image during this critical period. The work is packed with youthful optimism and possibility: “Pow!” and “You’ve come to the right place,” read other fragments of text. The child’s world is furnished with sustenance like Sweetgrass and Bitterroot, given in boththeir common and taxonomic names. Yet, the work also nods to perils and difficulty. The child, occupying the crucifix-shaped cutout at the center of the composition, is being inducted into a “School of hard knocks.” A human brain is wantonly carved into its phrenological parts. The divine potential of childhood meets the hard limits of a confused social world.

In Tierra Madre: Amy Bowers Cordalis (2024–2025), a female figure floats in the center of the composition with her palms facing outward. Plentiful salmon arch above her head—perhaps a reference to Cordalis’s conservation work on the Klamath river. In Tierra Madre: Maria Curie (2024–2025), the female is armless, but connected to all manner of symbolic forms: skulls, limbs, leaves, and horses. The compositions call to mind da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a comparison that Jaune Quick-to-See Smith made explicit in her 1992 The Red Mean: Self-Portrait. In contrast to da Vinci’s elevation of the singular, ideal (male) figure as the “measure of all things,” Smith positions the abstracted female form as the personification of nature itself, rather than a yardstick for creation. While each painting honors a specific woman, many of the Tierra Madres are faceless, egoless. For her decades of ceaseless advocacy for Native artists, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith no doubt belongs among this pantheon.

JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH

Born in 1940 in St. Ignatius, Montana, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. In 1980, she earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico. After the late 1970s, Smith had over 50 solo exhibitions, including at Kornblee Gallery (1979, New York), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (1990, New York), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1992, 1995, 1998, New York), and Jan Cicero Gallery (2000 and 2002, Chicago). In 2004, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania) opened Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America, which traveled to Keene State College (Keene, New Hampshire). In 2023, she became the first Native artist to be given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum when they mounted Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map—the most comprehensive exhibit of the artist’s work to date.

Quick-to-See Smith received numerous awards, such as the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, 1987; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, 1996; the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, 1997; the College Art Association Women’s Award, 2002; Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Women’s Award, 2005; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005; Visionary Woman Award, Moore College, Pennsylvania, 2011; Elected to the National Academy of Art, New York, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction Award, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award, 2014; the Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015; a United States Artists fellowship in 2020; an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2021; an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2022; and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award in 2023, among many others. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.

Quick-to-See Smith’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Stephen Friedman Gallery, now the co-representative of the artist’s estate with Garth Greenan Gallery, will present a solo exhibition in London this June. Fruitmarket (Edinburgh, UK) will also mount Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Wilding in November—the first posthumous museum exhibition of her work.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com

Kay WalkingStick and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith @ Saint Louis Art Museum

Saint Louis Art Museum purchases works by Native American women artists: Kay WalkingStick and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

The Saint Louis Art Museum has acquired works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Kay WalkingStick, deepening the museum’s commitment to Native artists with the addition of three critical pieces to the collection.

The acquisitions address gaps in the museum’s collection of works by contemporary Native American artists and leave a significant legacy at the museum for the recent exhibition “Action/Abstraction Redefined: Modern Native Art, 1940s-1970s,” an important presentation of modern Native art and the first exhibition of this size at SLAM.

Kay WalkingStick, American and Cherokee, born 1935 

“Personal Icon”, 1975; 

Acrylic, wax, and ink on canvas; 42 x 48 inches; 

Saint Louis Art Museum, The Siteman Contemporary Art Fund, and funds given by Barbara and Andy Taylor, the Werner Family, John and Susan Horseman, Christine Taylor-Broughton and Lee Broughton, Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg, Pam and Greg Trapp, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Wolff, Dottie and Kent Kreh, Dwyer Brown and Nancy Reynolds, Suzy Besnia and Vic Richey, Clare M. Davis and David S. Obedin, Yvette Drury Dubinsky and John Paul Dubinsky, in memory of Pauline E. Ashton, and Kiku Obata; 

© Kay WalkingStick

“We are in a moment of heightened visibility for Native artists across the country but especially in St. Louis,” said Min Jung Kim, the museum’s Barbara B. Taylor Director. “Adding these works to our collection is a way to continue to shed light on these vital artists, whose art speaks to both personal histories and wider cultural concerns. These acquisitions are also essential to the continued diversification of both our collection and our programming, ensuring that we provide our community with opportunities to see and experience the fullest view of human creativity from many different cultural and aesthetic traditions.”

One of the works—WalkingStick’s “Personal Icon”—was recently featured in the final gallery of the museum’s summer 2023 exhibition, “Action/Abstraction Redefined.” “Personal Icon” is among the last major works available from a pivotal era in her career. During the mid-1970s, WalkingStick turned away from figuration and experimented with different media while also investigating Native history for the first time. The 1975 painting repeats a low, swelling arc against a gridded frame of red encaustic; these experimental forms and materials shaped her practice subsequently.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Enrolled Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, MT, born 1940; 

“State Names Map: Cahokia”, and “Trade Canoe: Osage Orange”, 2023; 

Saint Louis Art Museum, The Siteman Contemporary Art Fund, and funds given by Barbara and Andy Taylor,The Werner Family, John and Susan Horseman, Christine Taylor-Broughton and Lee Broughton, Nancy and Kenneth Kranzberg, Pam and Greg Trapp, Mr. and Mrs. Gary Wolff, Dottie and Kent Kreh, Dwyer Brown and Nancy Reynolds, Suzy Besnia and Vic Richey, Clare M. Davis and David S. Obedin, Yvette Drury and John Paul Dubinsky, Judith Weiss Levy, Mr. and Mrs. Charles A. Lowenhaupt, and Mary Ann and Andy Srenco; 

© Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, Courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York; 

Image courtesy of Counterpublic, Photograph by Jon Gitchoff

Using collage and gestural painting, Quick-to-See Smith’s “State Names Map: Cahokia” reconfigures the United States map, using text with only those state names based on Indigenous words. In “Trade Canoe: Osage Orange,” the artist created the frame of a canoe using wood from an Osage Orange tree, and inside the canoe are cast-resin objects—mirrors, guns, liquor and a beaver—that highlight the destructive qualities of European trade goods on Indigenous peoples.

Both “State Names Map: Cahokia” and “Trade Canoe: Osage Orange” are new works that were featured in Counterpublic, a triennial civic exhibition that showcased contemporary art in locations across St. Louis from April through July. Nearly one-quarter of the artists in the 2023 Counterpublic cited Native heritage.

Quick-to-See Smith’s work has appeared in more than 90 solo exhibitions across the country, most recently “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. SLAM’s collection includes the mixed media painting “I See Red: Migration” and a suite of prints produced at Washington University’s Island Press including “Celebrate 40,000 Years of American Art.”

SAINT LOUIS ART MUSEUM

One Fine Arts Drive, Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri 63110

www.slam.org

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith @ Whitney Museum of American Art, New York - Memory Map

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Memory Map

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

April 19 - August 13, 2023

This exhibition is the first New York retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation), an overdue but timely look at the work of a groundbreaking artist. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map brings together nearly five decades of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures in the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work engages with contemporary modes of making, from her idiosyncratic adoption of abstraction to her reflections on American Pop art and neo-expressionism. These artistic traditions are incorporated and reimagined with concepts rooted in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s own cultural practice, reflecting her belief that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Employing satire and humor, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.

Across decades and mediums, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has deployed and reappropriated ideas of mapping, history, and environmentalism while incorporating personal and collective memories. The retrospective will offer new frameworks in which to consider contemporary Native American art and show how Smith has led and initiated some of the most pressing dialogues around land, racism, and cultural preservation—issues at the forefront of contemporary life and art today.

This exhibition is organized by Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

99 Gansevoort Street, New York, NY 10014

whitney.org

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith @ Garth Greenan Gallery, New York - Woman in Landscape

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 

Woman in Landscape 

Garth Greenan Gallery, New York 

November 4 – December 18, 2021 

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Adios Map, 2021

Oil, acrylic, and collage on canvas, 50 x 80 inches

© Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery

Garth Greenan Gallery presents Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Woman in Landscape, an exhibition of recent works. The exhibition includes 15 of Smith’s thickly impastoed mixed-media paintings, along with a number of recent mixed-media works and sculptures.

In her new series of monumental paintings, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith rotates the American map, encircling the landmass in a sea of bead and basketwork patterns from the Plateau region. This simple but iconoclastic act dislodges the landmass from its contextual meaning.

In one painting, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith paints America in saturated color—each state a different swatch of red. A headline reads “In the Future we Will all be Mixed Bloods,” reflecting a reality which prompts routine paroxysms of racial anxiety in America. Smith’s use of red is unstable— subsuming its roles in racial persecution and affirmative Native identity, and with blood itself which is symbolic of mortality, racial lineage, and even life. Elsewhere, a patch of inverted letters reads “sdrawkcaB,” suggesting that this imagined post-racial “mixed-blood” future may turn out to be elusive. References to billionaire space excursions, by Elon Musk and others, suggests that a new colonial exodus may already be underway.

Maps have never been mere objective descriptions of landmasses. They have been instruments in the exercise of power and territorial expansion. Across the series, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith hints at the map’s many potential alternate meanings. Female fertility figures grace each canvas, asserting that the landmass is, foremost, Mother Earth herself. Pictographic turtles reassert America’s previous title to many of its inhabitants: Turtle Island. References to “India” recall Columbus’s geographic mistake that still reverberates in our language. Through the simple rotation, Smith notes, the map becomes a “thing of Indian power.”

Born in 1940 at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on her reservation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana. Smith received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960, a BA in Art Education from Framingham State College, Massachusetts in 1976, and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980. Since the late ’70s, Smith has had over 50 solo exhibitions, including at Kornblee Gallery (1979, New York), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (1990, New York), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1992, 1995, 1998, New York), and Jan Cicero Gallery (2000 and 2002, Chicago). In 2004, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania) opened Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America which traveled to Keene State College (Keene, New Hampshire).

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Garth Greenan Gallery represents Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.

GARTH GREENAN GALLERY

545 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

www.garthgreenan.com