Throughout her six-decade career, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith advocated for Indigenous American communities, bringing activism and education into her practice to critique the fetishisation and objectification of her culture.
From the inception of her practice Smith focused on representing her Salish and Kootenai heritage. Paintings and sculptures from the early 1970s displayed the tanning of hides, moccasin wearing and multigenerational families living together. Following her graduation from the University of New Mexico in 1977, alongside Emmi Whitehorse and their peers, Smith formed the Grey Canyon collective, a group that strongly advocated for the representation of Indigenous artists. From 1979 to 1983 they staged what is considered to be the first major travelling exhibition of Native American artists across the United States, with venues including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, NM.
Over the years that followed Smith’s visual language became increasingly abstract, based upon symbols and pictographic motifs. Works on paper from the late 70s and 80s demonstrate the influence of traditional petroglyph forms and the colours of Native American stone carving and beadwork. These elements were combined with strategies drawn from the Pop canon, such as a radical embrace of commercial symbols. In her painting of the late 80s and 90s, Smith began working with readymade objects and collage, placing her subject matter in fields of news clippings, advertisements and gesturally applied paint; the language of Postmodernism, encapsulated in the work of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, became a clear influence. Pop references enabled her to explore media and mainstream culture directly, challenging the negative attitudes to Indigenous peoples in the United States.
From 1992, Smith’s work became even more embedded in the political. She began her I See Red series in response to the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus' arrival in the Americas. She harnessed the colour red as a symbol of anger, while also referencing the pejorative nomenclature ‘red Indian’ applied by settlers in North America in the late 18th century to those forcibly displaced by land seizure. In the same year Smith created her first map painting, a work depicting an outline of the United States without state borders, with collages and texts serving as a direct indictment of Native oppression and erasure. Cartography is a reoccurring motif throughout Smith’s late career, as she sought to challenge the arbitrary and presumptive power of lines drawn across stolen land.