The Carl & Marilynn Thoma Foundation is proud to have awarded a $150,000 grant to the Whitney Museum of American Art in support of its upcoming retrospective of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940). An enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith has forged a personal yet accessible visual language throughout her career that speaks to issues of identity, history, environment, and politics. She has deftly adopted Modernist ideas of abstraction, neo-expressionism, and pop, and has fused them with Indigenous artistic traditions in order to collapse boundaries between personal memory, collective consciousness, and historical recollection, as well as to challenge the status quo. Bringing together five decades of Smith’s work, the exhibition Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map will present more than 150 works in different media. It will explore Smith’s recurring and recognizable motifs, and how she has weaved together symbols of American capitalism and environmental destruction to offer meaningful criticism of those structures. The exhibition will be the artist’s largest presentation to-date and the first major exhibition of an Indigenous artist organized by the Whitney.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith works from left to right:
1. Grasp Tight the Old Ways, 2011. Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska-Lincoln; Courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
2. Indian Art History, II, 1993. Smith College Museum of Art. Printed by Maurice Sanchez. Published by Smith College Print Workshop.
3. The Vanishing American, 1994. Whitney Museum of American Art.
All works © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith