Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

1940 Flathead Reservation, Montana - 2025 Corrales, New Mexico

BiographyPainter, printmaker, and collage maker, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith created work that includes representational and abstracted images to create works with socio-political commentary including issues related to the environment, oppression, cultural appropriation, and Native American identity. An enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith was born in 1940 at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on her reservation. As a child, she travelled around the Pacific Northwest and California with her father, a horse trader, and carried around small drawings of animals her father drew for her. Smith earned an associate of arts degree from Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960. She worked as a waitress, Head Start teacher, factory worker, librarian, janitor, veterinary assistant, and administrative assistant to help support herself while she sought additional education. She earned her bachelor's in Art Education from Framingham State College in Massachusetts in 1976 and then her master's in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980. Smith's inspiration includeed Native American art, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Robert Rauschenberg. She has exhibited in over eighty solo shows and organized and curated more than thirty exhibitions. Smith has received awards including the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, l987; the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, 1997; the College Art Association Women’s Award, 2002; Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Woman’s Award, 2005; New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005; Visionary Woman Award, Moore College, Pennsylvania, 2011; Elected to the National Academy of Art, New York, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction Award, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award, 2014; The Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015; and four honorary doctorates: Minneapolis College of Art and Design, 1992; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1998; Massachusetts College of Art, 2003; University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2009. Today her work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

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