"Breaking the Buckskin Ceiling"

"Fierce" is probably a loaded word in describing a Native American woman because of its association with warriors, but Jaune Quick-to-See Smith might not mind given what the 83-year-old artist had to say about the genesis of this work which "was painted when women were running for office all over this country in unprecedented numbers. You see a woman standing on rocks, like a mountaintop. She is holding something called a talking stick, but this is actually a tool that women use at home to dig bitterroot and camas roots. I made it a symbol for her speaking her mind. I also put a mask on her, and above her head is a form that looks like a snake but it represents her speaking loud and strong. Could this be me? Maybe, sometimes."

"The Speaker" (2015)

"Memory Maps," her current retrospective, is the first mounted by the Whitney devoted to an Indigenous American.  Born on a reservation in Montana, Quick-to-See Smith has worked mostly in Albuquerque.  A backwater in the art world for sure, but less so now that major museums have frantically been playing catch-up.

    

"Petroglyph Park" (1987)

"Cheyenne Series #5" (1984) 

"Rain (C.S. 1854)" detail (1990)

Quick-to-See Smith obviously didn't create in a vacuum.  I see influences as varied as Jasper Johns and Jean-Michel Basquiat, but she filters them, often humorously and almost always politically, through a perspective based on the raw deal that white America has given her people.  Quick-to-See belongs to the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. Europeans called them "Flatheads" because some of her 19th-century ancestors practiced body alteration by pressing flat objects against the skulls of infants, perhaps to bestow instant recognizability, a low-tech form of tribal security.

 

"I See Red: Snowman" (1992) 

"Rain, I" (1993)

Quick-to-See Smith, who proudly claims to have "broken the buckskin ceiling," hasn't limited herself to a single medium.

"Urban Trickster" (2021)

She and her son, Neal Ambrose-Smith, collaborated on this "Warrior for the 21st Century" in 1999.

They're still collaborating two decades later, with each other, and with other Indigenous painters and sculptors who have established a communal alternative to the art world establishment.

"Trade Canoe:  Making Medicine" (2018) 

Bison and horses often appear in Quick-to-See Smith's work.

"Spam" (1995)

"War Horse in Babylon" (2005) 

Quick-to-See Smith reflects the environmental concerns of Indigenous peoples whose stewardship of their land is threatened by factory farming, forest fires and climate change.

"The Rancher" (2002)

She also has an extraordinary color palette.

"Who Leads? Who Follows? (2004)

The work from which the show's title has been taken is my favorite.

"Memory Map" (2000)

"Survival Map" (2021)

"The Natural World: A Thousand Drops of Dew" (2002)