She Can't Believe She's Still the First

Even decades of fighting for space in the art world couldn’t make Jaune Quick-to-See Smith lose her sense of humor.

- Joshua Hunt

ONE AFTERNOON IN February, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith sat at a long table in the center of her studio in Corrales, New Mexico, surrounded by images and motifs that she returns to again and again in her artwork: sketches of George Armstrong Custer, coyote heads cast in resin, and paintings of reimagined maps of the United States. To her left was a pile of notebooks, in which she collects words and phrases. She read from one: “Canoes. Empty Promises. Treaties.” Thumbing through another, she found a note to self: “Land acknowledgment: What’s it for?” ¶ Just as these lines could serve as the starting point for much of her work, small talk with Smith soon grows into something bigger. She speaks deliberately and at length—about a book she’s reading, an artist she’s researching, or her disgust with Montana governor Greg Gianforte’s campaign to end federal Endangered Species Act protections for grizzly bears. “I feel like they are massacring them,” she told me. “The idea of just hunting them for trophies, to take their heads—it’s criminal to me.”

The artist, who is 83, has been deploying symbols of American empire and Native identity in her work for decades, turning oil and acrylic paint, charcoal, prints, installation, and collage into wry political commentaries on post-genocidal existence. In Indian Madonna Enthroned, from 1974, her visual grammar emerges as a kind of three-dimensional collage using materials such as dried corn, pheasant wings, and beaded hide moccasins to create a figure of a Native woman sitting on a wooden chair and clutching the book