In Memoriam: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025)

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, courtesy of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
“We are devastated to hear the news of Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s passing. It is an honor to have her art in our collection and to have worked with her on The Land Carries Our Ancestors, our first-ever artist-curated exhibition, and the first Native-curated show at the National Gallery of Art in 30 years. Jaune was our teacher, and she shared her knowledge and resources with us generously. Her legacy will live on in the community she built through that exhibition, and countless other such efforts that elevated the contributions of Indigenous artists. She was a transformational figure and her passing is an immense loss.”
—Kaywin Feldman, director of the National Gallery of Art
About Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025)
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nations. She grew up on several other reservations in the Pacific Northwest and always returned to her relations on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation in Montana. Smith’s roles as artist, teacher, curator, and activist have resulted in hundreds of exhibitions over the course of 50 years, featuring both her work and that of other artists across the United States and in Europe.
Smith called herself a cultural arts worker. She used humor and irony to examine myths, stereotypes, and consumerism. Smith curated The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans (2023–2024), becoming the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. The National Gallery has three works by Smith in its collection, two of which are currently on view in our East Building: Target (1992), Adios Map (2021), and An Indian Ode to the Florentines (1980).
About The Land Carries Our Ancestors (2023–2024)
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith curated The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, an exhibition highlighting artworks by nearly 50 living Native artists that powerfully visualized Indigenous knowledge of land/landbase/landscape. Brought together by Smith, works by this intergenerational group of artists from across the nation span a range of practices, including weaving, beadwork, sculpture, painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, performance, and video. Their interpretive expressions reflect the diversity of Native intellectual acuity according to individual, regional, and cultural identities. At the same time, these works share a worldview informed by thousands of years of reverence, study, and concern for the land. As the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery, Smith underscored the self-determination, survivance, and right to self-representation of Indigenous peoples in her selection of artworks.
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