Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a fearless artist and indefatigable supporter of her peers who brought the full complexity of contemporary Indigenous experience into unmistakable view, died on Jan. 24 at her home in Corrales, N.M. She was 85.
Her death was announced by Garth Greenan Gallery in New York, which represented her. The gallery said she had pancreatic cancer.
Ms. Smith’s abiding artistic medium was collage, in the broadest sense of the word. With a range of works — including mixed-media canvases and conceptually tinted assemblages, as well as drawings and paintings that Joshua Hunt recently described in The New York Times as “Kandinsky turned loose in the American plains” — she seamlessly married a host of personal and political references with influences from European, American and Native art history.
Writing about a 1980 show of pastels and charcoal drawings for Art in America, Ronny H. Cohen noted that Ms. Smith drew on the narrative pictography and decorative abstraction of the Plains even while taking cues from artists like Paul Klee, Joan Miró and Robert Rauschenberg.
What held all these sources together was a consistent color palette of red and brown; a distinctively back-and-forth sense of composition in which a striking central image was often balanced by an undertow of peripheral figures; and Ms. Smith’s unerring instinct for narrative.
“Part of what I do in my work is using my work as a platform for my beliefs,” she said in an interview with the Smithsonian American Art Museum. “Can I tell a story? Can I make it a good story? Can I add some humor to it? Can I get your attention? Those are all things that I try to do with my artwork.”
That’s not to say that the combinations were always in harmony. On the contrary, Ms. Smith’s work was typically characterized by a special sort of tension, one that evoked a lingering sense of trauma, violence or loss. “Gifts for Trading Land With White People” (1992) is a 14-foot-long painting on which a simple canoe is drawn over collaged-in newspaper photographs of Native Americans; over it, Ms. Smith hung a clothesline’s worth of sports gear, chewing-tobacco packets and other items picturing Native American stereotypes.
The forthright, factual quality of the photographs is strikingly at odds with the grinning caricature on a Cleveland Indians baseball cap, while the painting, as a more or less conventional flat surface, exhibits a similar kind of clash with the line of objects dangling over it.
In other words, whether you consider its content or its form, it’s an artwork that refuses to settle down.
Ms. Smith’s career as a curator began in the 1970s, when, as a student at the University of New Mexico, she formed the Grey Canyon Artists collective with five other Native students and they immediately organized a traveling exhibition. Her own career was taking off, too: Shortly afterward, she had her first New York City solo show at Kornblee Gallery and was reviewed in Art in America and The Village Voice.
But whether because she was so often the first Native American artist in the room, because it had taken so much struggle to get there, or simply because she understood it to be a basic value of her culture, Ms. Smith never stopped trying to share the access and attention she won with her peers.
She curated more than 30 shows of Indigenous art. “The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans,” which opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2023, involved nearly 50 participating artists. A current show at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Jersey, “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” includes works in a variety of media made by 90 living artists from 50 distinct Indigenous nations and communities.
“I am not one. I am one among many,” Ms. Smith told Vulture in 2023. “My community comes with me.”
Jaune (pronounced “Zhawn”) Quick-to-See Smith was born on Jan. 15, 1940, in St. Ignatius Mission, on the Flathead Indian Reservation in western Montana. She was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation; she also had French Cree and Shoshone ancestry. The name Quick-to-See came from a great-grandmother of the same name.
Her mother, Hazel Wixon, disappeared from her life when she was 2, and she was raised by her father, Arthur Albert Smith, a horse trader.
She is survived by her husband, Andy Ambrose, a retired human resources consultant in the tech industry; her sons, Bill Ambrose and Neal Ambrose-Smith, an artist who often collaborated with her; her daughter, Roxanne Ambrose; and seven grandchildren.
Speaking to The New York Times in 2021, Ms. Smith described her childhood, much of it spent in Washington State, as “dystopian.” In addition to traveling with her father to sell horses, she worked alongside adults picking and processing fruit and vegetables.
But she found time to become a voracious reader while hiding to avoid chores, and she also managed to save scraps of paper on which her father had drawn animals. When she was 13, she saw the 1953 movie “Moulin Rouge,” about the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and decided to become an artist.
Pursuing higher education despite financial challenges, and despite being discouraged by instructors who she said told her that women couldn’t be artists and “Indians don’t go to college,” she earned an associate degree from Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., in 1960; a bachelor’s degree from Framingham State University, in Massachusetts, in 1976; and a master’s degree from the University of New Mexico in 1980. The University of New Mexico would later award her an honorary doctorate, as would Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Massachusetts College of Art and Design and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Well into the 1980s, Ms. Smith was still making modestly scaled, largely abstract paintings and works on paper. It was only around the end of that decade that her work got bigger, messier, more explicit and more complicated.
“In the 1980s I was talking to Andy Ambrose, my partner, and I told him, ‘I don’t think anybody’s listening to me. I’m not getting my messages across,’” she remembered in 2023. “And he said, ‘Well, think about an icon. Maybe you need an icon.’ And then I began thinking about what are the things that my tribe might see the most? And I thought about a woman’s cut-wing dress, a man’s war shirt, a man’s vest, the canoe, the buffalo, the horse and the coyote.”
She began drawing large-scale outlines of horses, canoes, men’s vests and buffalo, as in “Indian Drawing Lesson (After Leonardo)” (1993), in which a stately buffalo’s legs multiply to suggest motion, like the arms of Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
Even as she simplified her motifs, though, she was drastically increasing the number of elements seen behind them. A pair of large canoes, which appeared in two 16-foot paintings, “Trade Canoe for Don Quixote” (2004) and “Trade Canoe: Don Quixote in Sumeria” (2005), took on the Iraq war and American involvement in the Middle East with extensive casts of bellicose passengers.
“If you look carefully,” Ms. Smith explained, “you can see that I used everything I could find about war. There are references to the work of José Guadalupe Posada, skulls, devils, maggots, skeletons, characters such as Mickey Mouse with a dollar sign, and Goya’s and Picasso’s images about war.”
To make her goal — the representation of contemporary Native life — more transparent to viewers, she also began incorporating newspaper clippings. The technique was borrowed from Robert Rauschenberg, but its effect, in Ms. Smith’s hands, was different.
“If I do it,” she recalled in a 2023 New York Times profile, “I can make it so that it really says something.”
Ms. Smith’s work has been collected by many museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art.
A 2023 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, “Memory Map,” was the culmination of five solo shows there. It was also the museum’s first retrospective of a Native American artist.
“I think I’m a miracle, and I say that whenever I talk to an audience,” she said in 2021. “I tell them, ‘I’m a miracle, and any Native person is a miracle.’”
