Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (born 1940) is a Native American visual artist and curator.

She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and is also of Métis and Shoshone descent.

She is also an art educator, art advocate, and political activist.

She has been prolific in her long career, and her work draws from a Native worldview and comments on American Indian identity, histories of oppression, and environmental issues.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born on January 15, 1940, in St. Ignatius Mission, a small town on the Flathead Reservation on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation, Montana.

Her first name, Jaune, means "yellow" in French, pointing to her French-Cree ancestry.

Her Indian name, "Quick-to-See," was given to her by her Shoshone grandmother as a sign of an ability to grasp things readily.

As a child, Smith had an itinerant life.

Her father, a single parent who traded horses and participated in rodeos, frequently moved between several reservations as a horse trader.

As a result, Jaune lived in various places of the Pacific Northwest and California.

Growing up in poverty, Smith worked alongside migrant workers in a Seattle farming community between the ages of eight and fifteen years old, when school was not in session.

However, Smith knew very early on that she wanted to be an artist.

She remembers drawing on the ground with sticks as a four-year old, and in first grade, she recalls the first time she encountered tempera paints and crayons:"I loved the smell of them. It was a real awakening. I made a painting of children dancing around Mount Rainier. My teacher raved about it. Then with Valentine's Day approaching, I painted red hearts all over the sky. ... I see it as my first abstract painting.'"

In 1960, Smith began her formal art education in Washington State, earning an associate of arts degree from Olympic College in Bremerton and taking classes at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Her education, however, was interrupted because she had to support herself through various jobs as a waitress, Head Start teacher, factory worker, domestic, librarian, janitor, veterinary assistant, and secretary.

In the mid-1970s, Smith gained prominence as a painter and printmaker, and later she advanced her style and technique with collage, drawing, and mixed media.

Her works have been widely exhibited and many are in the permanent collections of prominent art museums including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth and the Walker Art Center as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum and National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Her work has also been collected by New Mexico Museum of Art (Santa Fe) and Albuquerque Museum, both located in a landscape that has continually served as one of her greatest sources of inspiration.

Smith has been creating complicated abstract paintings and lithographs since the 1970s.

She employs a wide variety of media, working in painting, printmaking and richly textured mixed media pieces.

Such images and collage elements as commercial slogans, sign-like petroglyphs, rough drawing, and the inclusion and layering of text are unusually intersected into a complex vision created out of the artist's personal experience.

Her works contain strong, insistent socio-political commentary that speaks to past and present cultural appropriation and abuse, while identifying the continued significance of the Native American peoples.

She addresses today's tribal politics, human rights and environmental issues with humor.

Smith is known internationally for her philosophically centered work regarding her strong cultural beliefs and political activism.

Smith's collaborative public artworks include the terrazzo floor design in the Great Hall of the Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle.

Smith's initial mature work consisted of abstract landscapes, begun in the 1970s and carried into the 1980s.

In 1976, she completed a bachelor's degree in Art Education from Framingham State College, Massachusetts, and then moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, to start graduate school at the University of New Mexico (UNM).

Her initial attraction to the university was its comprehensive Native American studies program, but after applying three times and being successively turned down, she decided to continue taking classes and making art.

After an eventual exhibition at the Kornblee Gallery in New York City and its review in Art in America, she was finally accepted into the Department of Fine Arts at UNM where in 1980 she graduated with a Masters in Art.

This liberal arts education formally introduced her to studies on the classical and contemporary arts, focusing on European and American artistic practices throughout the millennia, which served as her most influential point of access to the contemporary global art world.

From this background of her childhood and formal arts education, Smith has actively negotiated Native and non-Native societies by navigating, merging, and being inspired by diverse cultures.

She produces art that "follows the journey of [her] life as [she moves] through public art projects, collaborations, printmaking, traveling, curating, lecturing and tribal activities."

This work serves as a mode of visual communication, which she creatively and consciously composes in layers to bridge gaps between these two worlds and to educate about social, political and environmental issues existing deeper than the surface.

Her landscapes often included pictographic symbolism and was considered a form of self-portraiture; Gregory Galligan explains in Arts Magazine in 1986, "each of these works distills decades of personal memory, collective consciousness, and historical awareness into a cogent pictorial synthesis."

The landscapes often make use of representations of horses, teepees, humans, antelopes, etc.

These paintings touch on the alienation of the American Indian in modern culture, by acting as a sum of the past and something new altogether.

She does this by beginning to saturate her work with the style of Abstract Expressionists.

In 2020 the National Gallery of Art announced it had bought her painting I See Red: Target (1992), which thus became the first painting on canvas by a Native American artist in the gallery.

Smith actively supports the Native arts community by organizing exhibitions and project collaborations, and she has also participated in national commissions for public works.

She lives in Corrales, New Mexico, near the Rio Grande, with her family.