Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jan 17

Site: MONACO

For over thirty years, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation) has disrupted the iconicity of the United States map in paintings that insist upon the sovereignty of Native people, reclaiming the land’s image as a symbolic reclaiming of the land itself. For Counterpublic 2023, the artist began her research-intensive painting process for State Names Map: Cahokia by exploring St. Louis’s history of trade. Long before settlers arrived in the region then called Cahokia, it was the center of a vast trade network supported by the Mississippi River whose major and minor tributaries guided Native peoples from across the Americas including lands in Montana from where the artist is ancestrally descended. State Names Map: Cahokia asks us to look beyond the flattened space of the United States map to see the vastness of Indigenous life.

Quick-to-See Smith re-enlivens these networks in her map painting installed at Monaco, an artist-run cooperative in the center of the State Streets neighborhood—so called because its north-south-running avenues are named for US states while its east-west streets are named for Native nations. Throughout the State Streets neighborhood, curator Risa Puleo uses the format of the exhibition label to adapt street signs installed throughout the neighborhood (see the visitor map for more information) to bring forward the histories of dispossession hidden within them. Thus, for example, the crossing of Missouri Avenue and Osage Street indexes the history of nine treaties that forcibly removed Osage people from their ancestral homelands between 1808 and 1865 in the process of establishing Missouri’s statehood. Similarly, the intersection of Tennessee Avenue and Cherokee Avenue (where Monaco is located) references the Trail of Tears.

State Names Map: Cahokia is complimented by a canoe, similar to vessels that some Native people used to navigate the river in their trips to Cahokia. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s version is constructed from the wood of the Osage orange tree, named for the Native people who lived in Missouri and Arkansas where the tree grows. Additionally, the artist has filled the canoe with cast-resin recreations of the type of objects that would have been traded at Cahokia before and after settlement.

State Names Map: Cahokia is presented with support from The Horseman Foundation and Garth Greenan Gallery.

About the artist

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith has been creating complex abstract paintings and prints since the 1970s grounded in themes of personal and political identity. Smith has received the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, and more. She’s been an Art Table Artist Honoree, was elected to the National Academy of Art in New York, received the Living Artist of Distinction Award at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and has received four honorary doctorates. Smith’s work is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in Ecuador, the Museum of Mankind in Austria, The Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, The Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art.

2024 Announcement: Erased History Markers

In response to the work of artist Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith (Enrolled Salish, Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) and St. Louis’ State Streets Neighborhood, Counterpublic has created a series of Erased History Markers to be installed at eleven intersections where specific Native American Tribal Nations and the State names that displaced them meet, such as Osage Street and Missouri Avenue. Organized by Counterpublic 2023 curator Risa Puleo, each sign includes a brief description of the displacement of the Tribal Nation from that place, as well as links to current Tribal websites, additional treaty information, and Counterpublic’s website.

Intersections identified as part of this project are Osage & Missouri, Dakota & Minnesota, Chippewa & Minnesota, Chippewa & Wisconsin, Chippewa & Illinois, Winnebago & Wisconsin, Cherokee & Tennessee, Miami & Illinois, Potomac & Virginia, Miami & Ohio, and Miami & Indiana. These permanent signs aim to make apparent the histories of dispossession referenced by the intersection of street names in the State Streets neighborhood and are inspired by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s map painting commissioned by Counterpublic and newly acquired and now on view at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Counterpublic aims to connect art with generational change, and the Erased History Markers is one of several permanent commissions continuing to open throughout 2024. Working with private property owners, five of the signs have been installed and permissions are being sought for the remaining six intersections.

Learn more here.

Saint louis art museum acquisition + Exhibition

On May 3rd, 2024, the Jaune Quick-to-See Smith exhibition opens at Saint Louis Art Museum. The exhibition will highlight Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s works from the Museum collection. As one of the most celebrated contemporary artists of Indigenous heritage, this exhibition will span Smith’s career and draw attention to her work in St. Louis.

The exhibition marks the SLAM debut for State Names Map: Cahokia and Trade Canoe: Cahokia, a recent painting and sculpture Smith created in 2023 for the Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis. Based on two of her long-running series, the painting and sculpture respond to deep histories of cross-cultural trade and Indigenous displacement associated with the St. Louis region. Early pastels by Smith and a series of prints from the mid-1990s, many of which the artist made in St. Louis at Washington University’s Island Press, provide a long view of the artist’s career.

Joined by her son, artist Neal Ambrose Smith, on Saturday, May 4th, at 11 a.m. in the Museum’s Farrell Auditorium, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will speak about her wide-ranging artistic practice, highlighting the two artworks the Museum recently acquired.