Jaune-Quick-To-See-Smith

 "Where we lived, the settlers built their houses. Where

we drew fresh water, the oil companies sucked oil.

Where deer ran in countless numbers, we have a new

mall. Where the healing plants thrived; the river s

burning. Now, a fence cuts the road home. Next the sky

will be tethered and we will pay for air."

   -"Where we lived, the settlers built their houses." by Joy Harjo, from Conflict Resolution For Holy Beings, New York, W.W. Norton: 2015

Native Americans live in a post-genocidal world; this fact is embodied in the cartographic art of Jaune Quick-to-see Smith. Using paint, prints, and collage Smith obliterates the familiar political borders imposed on the land by white settlers.

For Smith, painting is a meditative process. Satire is a tool she uses to highlight stereotypes about Native peoples. "My art, my life experience, and my tribal ties are totally enmeshed. I go from one community with messages to the other, and I try to enlighten people." As an example, in one painting of the country she removed  the names of states except those American names - 27 of them when translated into English.

Jaune Quik-to-see was born on a reservation in Montana. Smith's first memory of making art was of dragging a stick through the dirt when she was three years old. As a small child, she treasured animal drawings of Growing up in poverty the girl found a way to create her own, more satisfactory world. Her pictures were a way she could share something with her father, an illiterate horse trader. Like many Native children of his generation, he had been taken from his family and sent a boarding school for deracination; when he spoke Salish, his mother tongue, the boy was beaten. 

As a teenager, she was told by a counselor that "Indians don't go to college."  When she persevered and enrolled at a college in Washington State, a professor told her that women couldn't be artists. She eventually earned an MFA in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico. Fortunately, she ignored the advice. Smith only began to show her art in New York at age thirty-nine. Her work has received numerous awards over the years.

 mage: Jaune-Quick-to-See Smith,  2021 acrylic and collage on canvas, courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, NYC.