Jaune Quick-to-See Smith by Marcus Civin

I recently had a wide-ranging conversation with the New Mexico–based painter, sculptor, activist, educator, and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. In tandem with her current retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, she reflected on her early art education, how she’s lived her life, the research she’s pursued on her own, how her artwork is received, and what else she’d like to accomplish. About the belated attention coming her way now, she shared that the Whitney’s director Adam Weinberg asked why she isn’t angry this didn’t happen sooner. Prompted by this question, she thought about how throughout her career curators would ask Indigenous artists to show their work at the last moment when another artist had backed out of an exhibition. She told Weinberg, “No, I’m not angry. I’m honored for this opportunity, and you don’t get me by myself. You get me with a community.” To that end, Smith is pleased to see the Whitney and other museums starting to collect more work by Indigenous artists.

—Marcus Civin

Marcus Civin To start off, can you talk about how you situate your work in relation to other artists?

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Years ago in school, I had teachers who were insistent on us doing mark-making, and if you tried to put an image in there, you got bawled out, and you had to get rid of that work and return to mark-making. That’s what I had to deal with. There were two things that I was looking for: one, content, because we weren’t allowed to have that; two, surface and construct, organization. Every time I went to New York City, I was looking for people like Luis Cruz Azaceta because of his politics. Loved that! Loved his paint. I would walk into a gallery and smell the oil paint drying there and swoon. I can’t tell you anything—not the smell of a mate, not the smell of my dogs, not the smell of a rose blooming—that can do that to me the way drying oil paint can. It’s the elixir of my life, just to sniff it! Luis Cruz would have thick oil paint drying. Of course, so would Joan Mitchell, Susan Rothenberg, Martha Diamond, Jennifer Bartlett, Frances Barth, Elizabeth Murray, Joyce Kozloff, George Condo, Terry Winters, Katherine Porter, and Joan Snyder. Oh, my god, that just makes my heart beat right now when I’m talking about those people! My dreams are made out of that.

My content has a relationship to every single Native artist, their work, and their humor: James Luna, Cara Romero, Diego Romero, Jeffrey Gibson, Jim Denomie. All of them. They’re the ones that make my world go round because the content in their work is feeding me. I say that, and then when I went to New York, I was looking at the painting, teaching myself to paint by looking at all these other people. So, whenever you read an article about me, you have a list of names in each article that’s different because I was so hungry to see art coming from my sandbox. I would go to New York and overload, come back with an art attack from looking at art and taking it all in.

The past two years I’ve been working on curating a show for the National Gallery of Art that’s going to open in the fall. I wanted it to be on land and landscape, but not the Hudson River view with the horizon line and some running water and a cloudy sky or something. I wanted it to be from a Native point of view. It is related to my research on languages. Here’s what I discovered that just gives me shivers: The languages that my father spoke—Kootenai, as well as Salish, and maybe Métis-Cree—were describing our world around us. There was no refrigerator. There was no radio. There was no TV in that language. There was no industrialization in that language. It was about our world. It was about the two parts to our world: the interior part and the exterior part, the world of realism and the world of mystery. Those worlds together composed our language.

I’m eighty-three. Younger Native American artists were raised on TV, radio, cars, all that. When I was a little kid, I lived in a cabin with two other families. We rolled up with our blankets against the walls. We didn’t have furniture. There was a pump outside that everybody used. There were outhouses. My sister and I dug through garbage piles at the backs of the cabins for food every day. We were hungry all the time. Remember, this was the Second World War. We were at the bottom. We ate dried salmon. That’s what we lived on. All I remember is being sick the whole time. I still have physical problems from that childhood, but I get up every day and feel grateful that I’m standing on my feet to work today to do some of the things that I think should get done and that I envision.

But I’m not doing as much as I would like. I would like to speed up the language immersion at home. I would like study about what do we do with our languages because now they’re almost like ancient languages. I’m concerned about putting out a book on contemporary Native art. That’s a long time coming. I want to do another large exhibition that includes two hundred Native American artists. I want to show people that we are alive, we’re here, and we’re not dead; we’re not vanishing. For fifty years I’ve been traveling and lecturing to audiences, and people raise their hand and go, “I’ve never met an Indian.” I’ll ask an audience, “Do you know how many tribes there are in the United States?” and they’ll raise their hands and say, “Two? Six?” We have 574 that are federally recognized; and then we have several hundred waiting for that recognition; and then state-recognized there are a couple hundred. We don’t know that because it’s not taught in school. So, I really want to ramp up education in public schools. To do that, I’ve started a small, private foundation. I’m hoping it will turn into a 501(c)(3). I want to publish books on Native children’s stories, and I want to start that this coming year.