Artist

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

born St. Ignatius, Flathead Reservation, MT 1940-died Corrales, NM 2025
Media - portrait_image_114971.jpg - 135980
Copyright unknown
Also known as
  • Jaune Quick-To-See-Smith
Born
St. Ignatius, Flathead Reservation, Montana, United States
Died
Corrales, New Mexico, United States
Active in
  • Corrales, New Mexico, United States
Biography

A Native American of French-Cree, Shoshone, and Salish blood, New Mexican artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith creates paintings and drawings that reflect her upbringing in a household where art and horses were equally important. In the initial stages of her career, Smith's painted landscapes inevitably contained a "portrait" of her horse Cheyenne shown with tepees, tools, pottery, and other Indian artifacts. Eventually Smith began to incorporate collage elements into her paintings, adding bits of calico and muslin fabric and wire mesh over which she lavished paint. The result was surfaces that acquired a texture and topography reminiscent of the landscapes she was depicting. Smith is part of the new generation of Native American artists who are helping to redefine their culture's relationship to contemporary American life and its problematic past. She lives and works in Albuquerque, in close proximity to the land that inspires much of her art.

National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)

Works by this artist (151 items)

Chiura Obata, El Capitán, 1931, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Obata Family, 2000.76.24, © 1989, Lillian Yuri Kodani
El Capitán
Date1931
color woodcut on paper
Not on view
Chiura Obata, Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.48), 1929-1930, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Obata Family, 2005.17.50, © 1989, Yuri Kodani
Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.48)
Date1929-1930
color woodcut on paper
Not on view
Chiura Obata, Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.43), 1929-1930, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Obata Family, 2005.17.45, © 1989, Yuri Kodani
Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.43)
Date1929-1930
color woodcut on paper
Not on view
Chiura Obata, Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.32), 1929-1930, color woodcut on paper, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Obata Family, 2005.17.34, © 1989, Yuri Kodani
Evening at Carl Inn (progressive proof No.32)
Date1929-1930
color woodcut on paper
Not on view

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      An interview with the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Jaune Quick-To-See Smith grew up on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and traveled around the Pacific Northwest and California with her father, who was a horse trader. Smith decided she wanted to be an artist after watching a film on the French painter Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. She painted a goatee on her face with axle grease and borrowed a neighbor's beret so she could be photographed posing as the famous artist. In 1958, Smith enrolled at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington. She had to take many breaks from college in order to earn money, however, and didn't earn her degree until 1976. She moved to Albuquerque, where she studied at the University of New Mexico and founded the Grey Canyon group of contemporary Native American artists. (Postmodern Messenger, Exhibition Catalogue, 2004)

      Exhibitions

      Media - 1985.66.404 - SAAM-1985.66.404_1 - 9039
      Picturing the American Buffalo: George Catlin and Modern Native American Artists
      October 11, 2019March 13, 2020
      Picturing the American Buffalo: George Catlin and Modern Native American Artists examines representations of buffalo and their integration into the lives of Native Americans on the Great Plains in the 1830s and in the twentieth century.

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