Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s expressionistic paintings, prints, and drawings explore Indigenous histories, identities, and foundational myths while confronting the injustices that Indigenous groups face. Smith, who was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation, combined aspects of traditional Indigenous art styles with more modernist pictorial aesthetics in the vein of Robert Rauschenberg and Paul Klee. Elements of commercial signage and slogans also appear throughout her work, which embraces both abstraction and representation, the modern and ancient, and the culturally rooted and personally idiosyncratic. Smith mounted many public installations across the U.S. including a floor design in the Denver International Airport, a site-specific piece in San Francisco, and a sidewalk history trail in Seattle. Her work belongs in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.