Current
Exhibition
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America
October 21 - December 23, 2009
An exhibition of drawing, printmaking, painting, and mixed-media installation, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America examines American Indian life in contrast to the consumerism of contemporary society. Her work is centered by her political activism and strong American Indian spirituality.
The artist’s fluency in both Native and Western cultures can be seen in her use of iconic Native imagery such as petroglyphs and pictographs combined with references to her Modernist predecessors, including Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Robert Rauschenberg. Often overtly Pop, her work is yet guided by sacred beliefs handed down from tribal elders. She sees a divine presence in earth and nature, which finds expression in her paintings, drawings, and prints. Her work is also deeply political as she addresses issues such as environmental destruction, governmental oppression of indigenous cultures, and war.
Quick-to-See Smith was born in 1940 at the Indian Mission on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana. A descendant of French, Cree, and Shoshone ancestors, she is an enrolled Flathead Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation. She received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington; a B.A. in Art Education at Framingham State College; and a Masters degree in art at the University of New Mexico.
Quick-to-See Smith has had over one-hundred solo exhibits, organized more than thirty exhibitions of American Indian art, and lectured at more than 200 universities, museums and conferences internationally.
Her works are in the collections of New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum as well as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The exhibition was organized for the Belger Foundation, Kansas City, Missouri by Charles M. Lovell and is supported in part by contributions from Robert C. Cudd III and Carol Downes Cudd and the Elizabeth Jane Moody Fund.
