Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Spent 50 Years Building What the Art World Refused to Give Her
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith died on January 24, 2025, in Corrales, New Mexico. She was 85, and she had pancreatic cancer.
Seven days after her death, the exhibition she’d spent her final months curating opened at Rutgers University. It featured 97 artists from 74 Indigenous nations, one last act of institution-building from a woman who had been doing that work for fifty years.
That timing is the shape of her life in a sentence.
Born into Something the Art World Didn’t Want to See
Smith was born January 15, 1940, at the St. Ignatius Mission on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. She was an enrolled citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, of French-Cree, Shoshone, and Salish heritage.
Her mother left the family when Smith was two. Her father was a Salish horse trader who kept the family moving through the Pacific Northwest and California, picking up seasonal work in canneries and on farms.
She raised two sons as a single parent before she finished her degree. She was 36 when she earned her B.A. in art education from Framingham State College, and 38 when she completed her MFA at the University of New Mexico.
None of that was the real barrier. The barrier was what she chose to paint.
Painting What She Knew, Not What They Wanted
Smith’s canvases were dense with evidence. She painted maps of treaty-ceded territories and layered government documents, newspaper clippings, and zoological illustrations with paint and found objects.
In 1992, for the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, she created Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People). It was an eight-foot painted canoe packed with mock-Native merchandise: sports team logos, toy headdresses, cheap trinkets.
Around it, she invited white gallery visitors to add their own trade goods. Golf clubs, plastic toys, bags of chips piled up around the canoe’s hull.
Critics called the work too political. Major collectors stayed away.
That same year, Smith painted I See Red: Target, an eleven-foot mixed-media canvas that centered the crosshairs of American culture on a Native body. It hung in galleries for nearly three decades before the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. finally acquired it in 2020.
That acquisition made Smith the first Native American artist ever to have work enter the NGA’s permanent collection. The painting was twenty-eight years old when the institution said yes.
Building the Room Herself
The major museums weren’t interested in what American Indian artists were making during the 1970s and early 1980s. Smith built the infrastructure herself.
In 1977, while still a graduate student, she organized the Grey Canyon Group, a collective of contemporary Native artists that included Emmi Whitehorse and Conrad House. The group staged exhibitions locally, then nationally, then internationally.
In 1982, she co-founded COUP MARKS, a cooperative that circulated Native art through more than 30 galleries in New York, Montana, and Washington, D.C.
She wasn’t waiting for a door to open. She was building the building.
Over her career, Smith curated more than 30 exhibitions, mentoring generations of painters, writers, and curators along the way.
Artist Jeffrey Gibson, Choctaw/Cherokee, said after her death: “She changed the world. She was always kind, generous, intentional, and just a fierce advocate for all of us.”
The Art World Catches Up
In 2023, the Whitney Museum of American Art mounted Memory Map, the first solo retrospective ever given to an Indigenous artist by that institution. It spanned more than 130 works across the museum’s floors.
Smith was 83 at the time. Her gallerist described her practice as a “curator’s dream,” one that merged abstract expressionism, pop art, and traditional Salish visual language into something no art history category could cleanly hold.
That same year, she became the first artist ever to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans brought dozens of living Native artists into an institution that had spent most of its history behaving as though they didn’t exist.
The auction market followed. In late 2022, I See Red: Talking to the Ancestors (1994) sold at Christie’s for more than $640,000 against a presale estimate of $80,000 to $100,000.
The collectors who had ignored her work for four decades had no idea what they’d been sitting on.
Still Building, Until the End
The final show Smith organized, Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always, opened at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers on February 1, 2025. Smith had died eight days earlier.
By design, the exhibition is larger than any single retrospective. It’s built to hold all of them.
She also established the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Memorial Scholarship at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, where her son Neal Ambrose-Smith teaches. The structure she spent fifty years building won’t stop standing when the retrospectives close.
What She Actually Taught
The viral posts about Smith’s life frame her story as one of individual persistence, an American Indian artist who kept painting until the market finally came around. That’s not wrong, but it misses what made her approach distinctive.
Smith didn’t just outlast a resistant art world. She actively built the systems that allowed other Native artists to survive the same resistance: the collectives, the curated exhibitions, the mentorship networks, the scholarship.
She understood that personal endurance isn’t enough when the gatekeepers control the building. So she kept constructing new buildings, for fifty years, until she had eight days left.
The art world didn’t recognize Jaune Quick-to-See Smith despite her work. It built recognition around the infrastructure she had already created for it.
What Comes Next
Smith’s work now lives in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always continues at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers.
The scholarship at IAIA keeps running. So do the 74 nations her last show brought to the same wall.
Reporting based on ICT News, NPR, Hyperallergic, The Art Newspaper, Fine Art Brokers, The Art Story.