The creative sprawl that is the Frieze London art fair seems to get bigger every year. Its influence on the wider art activity of the city is palpable, with everyone putting their best foot forward for the influx of international curators and collectors. But what about the fair itself? Although there’s always a significant smattering of work by market-friendly stalwarts, it does provide a fascinating and sometimes thrilling insight into what artists care about right now, especially in the curated Focus and Artist-to-Artist sections.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was the first Indigenous artist to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the first to join the permanent collection of National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. For her, the canoe was a marker of Indigenous identity, evoking the colonial trading networks through which resources and ideas circulated, while Indigenous communities faced dispossession and exploitation. This canvas appeared in her recent solo show at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh, and references an Indigenous creation story.
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