Jaune Quick-to-See Smith did not merely paint—she wielded her brush like a weapon, her canvases battlegrounds where history and identity collided. An enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith built a five-decade career crafting narratives of Indigenous resistance, survival, and renewal. From sprawling, mixed-media collages to visceral reinterpretations of U.S. maps, her work disrupted the white-walled sterility of the mainstream art world, demanding that Native perspectives be seen, heard, and reckoned with.
A Journey from Margins to Museums
Born in 1940 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, Smith’s early life was one of movement and toil. Her father, a horse trader, led a nomadic existence, and as a child, she worked in the fields alongside migrant laborers. Yet, art was always her beacon. Denied access to museums until adulthood and discouraged from pursuing art academically due to her Indigenous identity, she defied expectations. By the late 1970s, she was exhibiting in New York, her pastel landscapes already infused with the layered symbolism that would define her oeuvre.
The Language of Symbols: A Visual and Political Dialect
Smith’s work existed in a realm between modernist abstraction and Indigenous pictography. She borrowed from the Pop Art playbook of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, layering maps, commercial logos, and historical iconography to dissect colonial legacies. Her 1992 piece, I See Red: Target, skewered American consumerism and racism, splashing a blood-red canvas with caricatured Native imagery, from sports team mascots to cigarette packaging.
Similarly, her Trade Canoes series—a recurring motif since the 1990s—used the vessel as both literal and metaphorical transport, carrying the weight of displacement, environmental degradation, and cultural appropriation. In Trade Canoe for the North Pole (2017), flora and fauna from warmer climates crowded the boat, hinting at the environmental shifts wrought by colonial expansion.
Beyond the Canvas: A Curatorial Force
Smith was not only an artist but a curator and educator, tirelessly amplifying the voices of Indigenous artists. While still a student, she formed the Grey Canyon Group, a collective that exhibited work across the U.S. and beyond. She curated over thirty exhibitions, including the groundbreaking Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage (1985) and The Land Carries Our Ancestors (2023), the latter marking the first contemporary Native American art show at the National Gallery of Art in three decades.
A Legacy Cemented
The belated recognition of Smith’s genius was a telling indictment of the art world’s historical neglect of Native artists. In 2020—at the unfathomably late age of eighty—she became the first Native American artist to have work acquired by the National Gallery of Art. In 2023, she was honored with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum, the first such exhibition of an Indigenous artist in the museum’s ninety-three-year history.
Her passing in 2025 leaves a void, but also a legacy of radical visibility. The histories she wove into her canvases, the institutions she pried open, and the artists she uplifted ensure that her impact will continue to ripple outward. As Smith once said, “Art should reveal the unknown to those who lack the experience of seeing it.” She did precisely that—and in doing so, transformed the art world forever.