Works by one of the most acclaimed Native American artists working today, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, are now on view at the Mandeville Gallery in the Nott Memorial.
The solo exhibition features oil paintings and prints, including monotypes, intaglio and lithography. A self-described cultural arts worker, Smith is internationally known for her art and as a curator, lecturer and professor.
Her work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Brooklyn Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Quito, the Museum of Mankind in Vienna and many other prominent collections.
“I’m thrilled to be able to present someone of Jaune’s stature to our campus community,” says Julie Lohnes, curator of Art Collections and Exhibitions. “She uses humor and satire to examine myths, stereotypes and the paradox of Native American life in contrast to the consumerism of American society.”
Smith will give an artist talk and reception at the Nott Tuesday, Sept. 16, from 5 to 7 p.m. Light refreshments will be served. The event is free and open to the public.
The show runs through Nov. 30.
Smith was born at the St. Ignatius Mission on a Montana reservation, home to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, of which she is an enrolled Salish member. In the last 40 years, she has had more than 100 solo exhibitions of her work.
She also has curated or organized some 30 Native American exhibitions and serves as an activist and spokesperson for contemporary Native art. She has lectured at hundreds of universities, museums and conferences worldwide.
Her collaborative public artworks include the terrazzo floor design in the Great Hall of the Denver Airport; an in-situ sculpture piece in Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco; and a mile-long sidewalk history trail in West Seattle.
She is the recipient, most recently, of the National Art Education Association Ziegfeld Lecture Award (2014); the Living Artist of Distinction Exhibition, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico (2012); and Moore College of Art and Design’s Visionary Woman Award (2011).
She was inducted into the National Academy of Art in 2011.
Smith holds a B.A. in Art Education from Framingham State College in Massachusetts and an MFA from the University of New Mexico.
Art in America art critic Gerrit Henry has written of the artist: “For all the primal nature of her origins, Smith adeptly takes on contemporary American society in her paintings, drawings and prints, looking at things Native and national through bifocals of the old and the new, the sacred and the profane, the divine and the witty.”