The number of Native American artists who show in New York is vanishingly small, which makes this presentation of paintings and sculptures by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith all the more welcome. A member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Nation, Smith, 78, was born on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and currently lives and works in Albuquerque, New Mexico. As you might expect from an artist who calls herself a political activist, Smith focuses her energies on the centuries-long history of genocidal warfare and continental-scale land theft that characterized the white conquest of North America.
Taking style points from Native American art like the Sioux drawings of the Battle of Little Bighorn, Smith aims satirical barbs at these epochal crimes, reminding viewers that settlers victimized the land as well indigenous inhabitants. Her vehicle in this respect is a literal one: The canoe, a native innovation also used by European traders who plied the New World’s rivers and lakes as stalking horses of colonization. Here, they’re seen bearing cargoes of death, depredation and environmental devastation.
Two sculptures of the craft are rendered as skeletal frameworks suspended from the ceiling. One is laden with loaves of fry bread, a native foodstuff that originated with the Long Walk of 1864, a 400-mile forced-march eviction of the Apache and Navajo from their tribal lands. The other piece, painted a shade of primer red along with its contents, is filled with Styrofoam takeout containers, coffee cups and plastic water bottles interspersed with crucifixes, suggesting that consumerism and Christian missionary work are flip sides of the same catastrophic coin.
A series of multi-panel compositions pick-up the canoe theme with the subject in profile, pushed up against the picture plane. Pile of skulls, landscape elements and familiar faces like General George Armstrong Custer (speaking of Little Bighorn) and Wile E. Coyote are all part of the manifests being born across still waters.
Another pair of paintings, respectively titled Fifty Shades of White and Fifty Shades of Brown, replace states on the U.S. map with colors, so that California, for example, is labeled Glamorous White in the former and Spanish Chestnut in the latter. The question these canvases seem to raise is whose land is it, anyway?
The answer, of course, is that it depends on who you ask. The truth is that white people aren’t going anywhere and neither will the memory of their historical transgressions. In any case, within the next quarter to half century, they will become a minority in the country they built with blood on their hands. This show seems to ask, quite righty, whether they will honestly confront the past even then.