Another vital figure in women’s art history is alive and well, and today launched her largest exhibit yet: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at Seattle Art Museum (Feb. 29 – May 12). Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the show features some 130 works — paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints — by the celebrated 84-year-old artist, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation.
At the press preview, decked out in all-black clothing and Doc Marten boots, Smith shared her many Seattle connections. She grew up in the Puget Sound region, attended Kent Junior High and Kent Meridian High School and earned an AA at Olympic College in Bremerton. In the 1980s, she created a Chief Seattle (or C.S.) series of paintings, incorporating images and quotes from the Duwamish and Suquamish leader.
“Being here at Seattle Art Museum is a surrealistic dream for me,” she said. “I keep pinching myself.”
Covering some 50 years, the show runs thick with Smith’s iconography. Canoes appear again and again, sometimes suspended in midair and filled with Starbucks cups, plastic water bottles and other trash, all painted an eerie ochre. Mixing petroglyphs and pop-culture ephemera, including newspaper and magazine headlines, Smith — a longtime activist for human rights and environmental issues — cleverly questions the status quo.
When she was finally able to study it, Smith took to art history like a crow to shiny objects. Across the colorful urgency of her work, you can find elements of abstract and Pop Art, cartoons and collage, Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns, Mickey Mouse and McDonald’s — all of it blended with Indigenous animism and her own biting humor.
There is so much woven into each work, including one of her earliest pieces: “Indian Madonna Enthroned” (1974), a life-size soft sculpture of a Native woman draped in an American flag, her hands made of feathers, her heart a dried corn cob.
And outside, across the bridge, one more way to experience Smith’s artmaking: The West Seattle Cultural Trail, an annotated walk from Alki Point to Duwamish Head, which she created in 1997 with artists Joe Feddersen and Donald Fels. The path is still peppered with bronze plaques and viewfinders offering a sense of the layered histories in which Smith is so fluent.
Brangien Davis
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