JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH

- JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH -

Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, 1940—

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith 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.

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, 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. 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.