JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Visual artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has died following a long battle with pancreatic cancer. She was 85 years old. NPR's Chloe Veltman reports that Smith helped to put the work of indigenous artists on the art world map.
CHLOE VELTMAN, BYLINE: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was a trailblazer. She was the first Native American artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York and the first to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
GARTH GREENAN: Jaune's work is very visually appealing.
VELTMAN: That's Smith's gallerist, Garth Greenan.
GREENAN: There's a pop quality to it. There's a story. So she's kind of a curator's dream.
VELTMAN: Smith's work combines indigenous artistic traditions and symbols, such as trickster coyotes and rabbits, with Eurocentric modernist style, such as abstract expressionism and pop art. It delivers a political punch, often with piercing humor. Here the artist is in a 1995 NPR story describing one of her paintings, featuring the label from a tin of Italian olive oil...
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
JAUNE QUICK-TO-SEE SMITH: That has the picture of a Native American praying to the heavens. And this is not something that would ever happen on her reservation.
VELTMAN: Smith said Native American people face these bizarre caricatures of themselves every day.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
SMITH: And by putting it here and making us look at it, we realized how ridiculous some of it really is.
VELTMAN: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was born in 1940 on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Her mother abandoned her when she was a toddler. Smith and her father, a horse trader, moved around a lot. The artist reminisced about how he would draw pictures of animals for her in a 2012 video for the Smithsonian.
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SMITH: It took me into a place that didn't have violence in it, didn't have hunger. It was just the most wonderful place to be.
VELTMAN: Smith decided she wanted to be an artist after watching John Houston's 1952 film "Moulin Rouge," about Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MOULIN ROUGE")
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR: (As character) Fabulous artist, famous lover.
VELTMAN: According to the Smithsonian, she even posed for a photograph as the French painter in a neighbor's beret and painted goatee. But it was years before Smith was able to get a formal arts education and develop her career, owing to prejudices against indigenous and women artists. Tahnee Ahtone is the curator of Native American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.
TAHNEE AHTONE: She experienced rejection very early in these academic art programs, and to be able to overcome that - that is about her determination.
VELTMAN: Smith's career took off in the late 1970s and '80s. She had dozens of solo shows. Collectors snapped up her work. Major museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired her art for their collections, and she was adept at hobnobbing with mainstream artists and their entourages. Ahtone says all of this sometimes caused friction in Native American art circles.
AHTONE: There were other artists that had a hard time with her success.
VELTMAN: But Ahtone says Smith was deeply generous. She organized many group shows featuring indigenous artists, becoming the first artist ever to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery in 2023.
AHTONE: She's been a mentor to a lot of artists, a lot of writers, curators.
VELTMAN: And Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's love of nurturing the talents of others continues beyond the grave. An exhibition she created featuring the work of 90 contemporary Native American artists just opened at Rutgers University. Chloe Veltman, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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