Subscribe
Search
ePaper
Newsletters
Subscribe
ePaper
Newsletters
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Art market
Museums & heritage
Exhibitions
Books
Podcasts
Columns
Technology
Adventures with Van Gogh
Search
Preview

An overdue retrospective for an artist in touch with America’s dark ‘underbelly’

Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has been transforming the contemporary art canon for decades with multilayered works that address cultural misconceptions with humour

Benjamin Sutton
11 May 2023
Share
In the beginning: Indian Map (1992) was the first Jaune Quick-to-See Smith work to repurpose the US map as a way of criticising land theft and countering settler foundation myths and stereotypes about Native Americans

Smith: © the artist, Photo by David Bowers

In the beginning: Indian Map (1992) was the first Jaune Quick-to-See Smith work to repurpose the US map as a way of criticising land theft and countering settler foundation myths and stereotypes about Native Americans

Smith: © the artist, Photo by David Bowers

The latest retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art features works evoking artists that the institution has championed for decades. There are canvases repurposing advertising iconography in a manner similar to Andy Warhol. There are paintings structured around the map and flag of the United States that evoke Jasper Johns. And there are mixed-media works incorporating newspaper clippings and other printed imagery that call up the collage aesthetic of Robert Rauschenberg. They are all by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, an artist and activist who is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, whose retrospective is the first by a Native American artist that the Whitney has organised since it opened 92 years ago. It comes at a moment of reckoning and institutional self-reflection for US museums.

“The most important thing that happened was Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and Standing Rock—that began to shake some of the institutions in this country and rattle their cages,” Smith says. “It was clear that there was an underbelly to this country that wasn’t happy with the way things are.”

Curated by Laura Phipps, an assistant curator at the Whitney, Memory Map brings together more than 100 paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings made during the course of nearly five decades. Appropriately, pride of place in the exhibition is given to Indian Map (1992), Smith’s first painting structured around the US map.

The Week in Art

The mystic and the Modernist: Hilma af Klint and Piet Mondrian

Hosted by Ben Luke and Benjamin Sutton. Produced by Julia Michalska, David. Clack and Aimee Dawson
Sponsored byChristie's

“I began with the premise that the map didn’t belong to Jasper Johns, the map was an abstract image of stolen land in this country, so how could I turn the map into a new story?” the artist says. “I had a real struggle with that.”

Smith layered the canvas with fragments of newspaper headlines, whole articles, advertisements and more. The broiling composition is dominated by thick strokes of red, orange and pink that evoke smeared blood but also petroglyphs like those near Smith’s home in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The composition is punctuated by collaged photographs of Native Americans taken by the ethnologist Edward Curtis, who helped spread images and an idea of his sitters as historical subjects of a bygone era.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Genesis, 1993. High Museum of Art, Atlanta; purchase with funds provided by AT&T NEW ART/NEW VISIONS and with funds from Alfred Austell Thornton in memory of Leila Austell Thornton and Albert Edward Thornton, Sr., and Sarah Miller Venable and William Hoyt Venable. © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Photograph courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York

Throughout the exhibition, Smith works to resist Euro-American narratives and stereotypes about Native Americans, often relying on satire and humour. Her 1994 lithograph Modern Times, for instance, appropriates an industrial apple grower’s logo—an icon of a generic Indigenous figure wearing a colourful, feathered headdress—and affixes it to the body of a man in a business suit. Indigenous people are complex and contemporary individuals living today, the work slyly asserts, not static signifiers of old history.

Exhibitions

Native American painter Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will be the first artist to curate a show at the US National Gallery of Art

Benjamin Sutton

For Smith, the colonisation of the Americas, systemic mistreatment of Indigenous people and people of colour, and the destruction of the environment are all linked, and some of the largest paintings in the show bring all these themes together with great force. Among them is Trade Canoe for the North Pole (2017), a 13ft-wide painting of a canoe navigating icy-blue waters. On board are three palm trees, fragments of drawings and collaged elements including some of Smith’s distinctive animal characters such as buffalo and coyote. Near the bow of the canoe, a collaged newspaper clipping issues a stark warning: “Listen up humans.”

  • Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, Until 13 August, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
PreviewExhibitionsWhitney Museum of American ArtIndigenous art Museums & HeritageNew York Spring Fairs 2023
Share
Subscribe to The Art Newspaper’s digital newsletter for your daily digest of essential news, views and analysis from the international art world delivered directly to your inbox.
Newsletter sign-up
Information
About
Contact
Cookie policy
Data protection
Privacy policy
Frequently Asked Questions
Subscription T&Cs
Terms and conditions
Advertise
Sister Papers
Sponsorship policy
Follow us
Facebook
Instagram
YouTube
LinkedIn
© The Art Newspaper