Jaune Fast-to-See Smith, an artist and activist who was a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, died on 24 January after an extended battle with pancreatic most cancers. Her gallery in New York, Garth Greenan Gallery, confirmed the information of her demise. She was 85.
Smith’s work usually took on, critiqued, ridiculed and subverted the imagery of mainstream Americana in addition to the US Trendy artwork orthodoxy throughout work, sculptures, prints and extra. She made works paying homage to Andy Warhol that riffed on promoting iconography, intricate collages and transfers evocative of Robert Rauschenberg, and work based mostly on the flag and map of the US that interpollated Jasper Johns. All through she injected her personal imagery and commentary—typically playful, typically arrestingly bleak—concerning the darker points of US historical past, particularly the systematic killing, dispossession and stereotyping of Native Individuals.
On the time of her 2023 exhibition on the Whitney Museum of American Artwork—the primary retrospective dedicated to a Native American artist within the museum’s historical past, curated by Laura Phipps—Smith advised The Artwork Newspaper of her map work: “I started with the premise that the map didn’t belong to Jasper Johns, the map was an summary picture of stolen land on this nation, so how may I flip the map into a brand new story?”
Jaune Fast-to-See Smith, I See Purple: Goal, 1992. Nationwide Gallery of Artwork, Washington, DC Courtesy of the property of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
That exhibition (which subsequently travelled to the Trendy Artwork Museum of Fort Value in Texas and the Seattle Artwork Museum) got here amid a wave of long-overdue recognition, although Smith had been displaying work and championing that of different Native American artists for many years. The identical yr, she curated The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Modern Artwork by Native Individuals, the first-ever present on the Nationwide Gallery of Artwork (NGA) in Washington, DC, to be curated by an artist. In 2020, Smith’s towering mixed-media canvas I See Purple: Goal (1992) grew to become the primary portray by a Native American artist the NGA had ever acquired. Previous to her demise, Smith had been engaged on her subsequent main curatorial effort, Indigenous Identities: Right here, Now & All the time, which opens at Rutgers College’s Zimmerli Artwork Museum later this week (1 February-21 December).
Smith mirrored on the current reckoning with systemic racism at US museums on the time of her Whitney retrospective. “Crucial factor that occurred was Black Lives Matter, George Floyd and Standing Rock—that started to shake a few of the establishments on this nation and rattle their cages,” she mentioned. “It was clear that there was an underbelly to this nation that wasn’t proud of the best way issues are.”
All through her work, Smith resisted Euro-American narratives and stereotypes about Native Individuals, usually doing so by way of satire and humour. Her 1994 lithograph Trendy Instances, as an illustration, appropriated an industrial apple grower’s emblem—an icon of a generic Indigenous determine sporting a vibrant, feathered headdress—and affixed it to the physique of a person in a enterprise go well with. The ensuing mashup slyly asserts that Indigenous individuals are complicated and modern people residing at the moment, not static symbols of historical past.
Jaune Fast-to-See Smith, Commerce Canoe: El Dorado, 2024 Courtesy of the property of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
“Jaune’s loss is deeply felt and indescribably vital. She was a beloved mentor and buddy and really one of the considerate and proficient human beings I’ve encountered,” Garth Greenan, her longtime supplier, mentioned in a press release. “She was one of many very brightest lights in modern American artwork. If a extra beneficiant individual ever existed, I’d like to fulfill them.”
Born in 1940 on the St Ignatius Indian Mission in Montana, Smith spent the latter a part of her childhood close to Tacoma, Washington, earlier than incomes a bachelor’s diploma in artwork schooling from Framingham State Faculty in Massachusetts in 1976. She then moved to Albuquerque to pursue a level in Native American research on the College of New Mexico, however was not accepted to the programme. As a substitute, she enrolled within the college’s artwork programme, graduating with a grasp’s diploma in 1980. Across the similar time, she grew to become concerned with the Tamarind Institute, a famend lithography studio that’s now a part of the College of New Mexico. In 2008, the college gave her an honorary doctorate.
Jaune Fast-to-See Smith, I See Purple: Indian Map, 1992. Glenstone Basis Courtesy of the property of the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York
In an interview for the Whitney Museum retrospective’s catalogue with the curator and artwork historian Lowery Stokes Sims, Smith mirrored on an influential sequence she made in response to the five hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival within the Americas.
“In 1992 I created a sequence of works titled I See Purple to remind viewers that Native Individuals are nonetheless alive,” she advised Sims. “That is at all times my curiosity, regardless that I’m collaging issues like outdated images and Thirties fruit labels on the surfaces of those work. However then there are additionally newspaper articles about present occasions. So there’s a historic continuity from one thing prior to now, as much as the current.”
