Smith was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana, who tirelessly championed the work of her fellow Indigenous American artists and paved the way for their burgeoning and overdue recognition with a series of her own firsts. In 2020, Smith became the first Native American artist to have their work enter the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, which was followed in 2023 by an invitation from the museum to curate an exhibition honouring her artistic community, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. Smith was the first Indigenous artist to curate an exhibition at the museum.
Throughout Smith's six-decade career, activism and education played a central role in a practice that critiqued the fetishisation and objectification of her culture. From its inception Smith focused on representing her Salish and Kootenai heritage. Following her graduation from the University of New Mexico in 1977, Smith and her peers 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.
In 1992 Smith 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.
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.
In 1992 Smith 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.