Feminist to Know: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an influential Indigenous artist whose abstract paintings and prints commented on Indigenous cultural identity while carving a new space for Indigenous artists in the formal art world.

Born in 1940 on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, which was established with the signing of the Treaty of Hellgate in 1855, Jaune Quick-To-See Smith began making art from a very young age. She found that an art practice––even one founded upon using nontraditional materials like mud, leaves, and sticks––provided a way to enter “another world,” she described, “one that took me out of the violence and fear that dominated my life.” She grew up with her sister and father traveling between the Pacific Northwest and California, working in canneries and farms even as a child with other migrant farmworkers. The uncertainty and strain of their life together weighed heavily upon her.

In 1954, when Quick-to-See Smith was a teenager, a 1953 Congressional bill was passed that targeted the Flathead Reservation for liquidation (one of 60 proceedings initiated against tribes). This was devastating for Quick-to-See Smith, and the direct attack upon her community shaped her political development and provided an ideological backbone for her art practice moving forward.

Quick-to-See Smith pursued a formal arts education in 1958 when she enrolled at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington, followed by an Associates of the Arts degree in 1960, and then a Masters in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980. Her earliest work involved drawing landscapes of the places she grew up. Over time, she began to incorporate more explicitly political themes into the work, beginning with what she called “inhabited landscapes,” paintings which featured Indigenous figures in their homelands overlaid with found objects like wire. 

By the 1990s, with the impending 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the Americas, Quick-to-See Smith felt an urgent need to directly call out the United States’ genocide of Native peoples in her work. She began her famous I See Red series, where she incorporated direct criticism of the United States’ legacy of colonialism and culture of appropriation. As a whole, Quick-to-See Smith’s paintings tend to be deeply political, overtly critical of the U.S. government, and dedicated to highlighting Indigenous cultures.

Beyond her artistic practice, Quick-to-See Smith is dedicated to environmental activism and founded the Nomad Art Manifesto, which advocates for innovations to classical art-making practices: 

The Nomad Art Manifesto:

Nomad Art is made with biodegradable materials

Nomad Art can be recycled

Nomad Art can be folded and sent as a small parcel

Nomad Art can be stored on a bookshelf, which saves space

Nomad Art does not need to be framed

Nomad Art is convenient for countries which may be disbanding or reforming

Nomad Art is for the new diaspora age.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s impact upon the art world in the United States is immeasurable; she is one of the few Native artists recognized by the mainstream art world (she became first Native American person ever to have their work acquired by the National Gallery of Art in 2020), a testament to her dedication to “breaking the buckskin ceiling.” She saw herself, rightly, as leading the way for a new generation of Indigenous artists, noting that “when I come through the door, I bring a community with me.”