Citation for Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Visual artist. Educator. Political activist.

Or, as you choose to describe yourself: cultural arts worker.

You survived what you’ve called “a dystopian childhood” on the Flathead Reservation in Montana. Your experiences laboring in fields as a child alongside migrant workers and survivors of Japanese internment camps, together with your own experiences as a Native American living in poverty, instilled in you a lifelong commitment to critiquing Western imperialism and the inequities of capitalism, and to speaking out on behalf of the colonized, displaced, and oppressed.

And perhaps fittingly for someone whose given Native name is “Quick-to-See,” you knew from the start that you would do it primarily through art. Even though you didn’t set foot in a museum until your 20s, you wanted to be an artist, you’ve said, “from before [you] knew what the word meant.”

But what was obvious to you raised doubts in others. Not because you lacked ability — your high school teacher said you were clearly more talented than all the boys in your class — but because the same teacher went on to tell you that “women don’t become artists.”

On top of that, according to your high school counselor, “Indians don’t go to college.”

You went to college, and you became an artist — an artist who has had more than 80 solo exhibitions, who is represented in the permanent collections of dozens of galleries and museums (including, here in New York, the Met, MOMA, and the Whitney), who has given hundreds of lectures at universities, museums, and conferences, who has received an array of honors and awards, and who has become one of our great curators and ambassadors of Native American art.

Your painting, prints, lithographs, drawings, collages, multimedia works, and public installations satirize consumerism and the cultural appropriation of Native American art and traditions, draw lines between the Native genocides of the past and the complexities of Native American life today, visualize the cultural juxtaposition between separation and assimilation, and so much more.

A staunch environmentalist, you’ve also taken aim at your own profession by creating the Nomad Art Manifesto, calling for art that is made with biodegradable materials, that can be recycled, that can be folded and stored on a bookshelf, and that meets several other criteria for non-wastefulness and geographical mobility.

That commitment to exploring the meaning, limits, and symbolic representations of geography and space was brilliantly evoked in a solo exhibit late last year at New York City’s Garth Greenan Gallery. Naming it one of the best art exhibits of 2021, the New York Times observed that you “continued [your] incisive manipulations of the American map, turning it sideways, flanking it with patterns from Native American textiles and baskets, larding it with barbed comments.”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: For continuing to gift us with incisive visual manipulations and artistically clever and astute barbed comments; for shining the spotlight on other Native American artists who follow in your legendary footsteps; and for discovering new possibilities and setting new standards for bold and boldly political art, it is my pleasure to present you with a 2022 Barnard Medal of Distinction.