The art world has lost a trailblazer.
On Tuesday, Indigenous artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith—whose raw works depicting contemporary Native life have appeared at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Denver Art Museum, and other major institutions—died at 85, following a battle with pancreatic cancer. The news was confirmed by the Garth Greenan Gallery in New York.
Smith, who was of Salish-Kootenai, Métis-Cree, and Shoshone-Bannock descent, enjoyed a fruitful career as a painter, mounting more than 80 solo exhibitions—including the 2023 retrospective “Memory Map,” held at the Whitney in New York—over five decades.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, I See Red: Indian Map, 1992, mixed media on canvas.Courtesy of the Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
She was born in 1940 on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana, where she was raised by her father, a horse trader. In the late 1970s, after studying at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, and the University of New Mexico, Smith began to develop the style that became her signature, rooted in abstract landscapes, Jasper Johns-esque maps, and pictographs addressing some of the issues facing modern Native Americans.
“For decades, Jaune’s work made visible the lived experiences of Indigenous people when few in the art world made space for such perspectives,” says John P. Lukavic, the Andrew W. Mellon curator of Native arts at the Denver Art Museum, where Smith’s work has been displayed. “She helped kick open doors and paved the path for others to follow.”
While her work could be unflinchingly dark—taking on the racism, displacement, and violence against her community—she also injected it with levity and a sense of humor, often deliberately mimicking the styles of influential painters like Andy Warhol or Pablo Picasso. (Her 2021 Survival Map alluded to the power of humor as a coping mechanism in difficult times, reading, “NDN Humor causes people to survive.”)
