Corrales artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith uses pop art, abstraction to reflect the trespasses of Europeans on Native America

Apr. 16—CORRALES — Days before her career retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Corrales artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is already charting a new body of work.

Inside a coverted furniture store warehouse, the groundbreaking Confederated Salish/Kootenai Nation creator is designing and building a series of skeletal canoes from recycled and fallen cedar, pine and cherry wood.

Quick-to-See Smith's painting of a map of the United States, marked by winding rivers, speckled with bison and coyotes and tribal names, provides the backdrop behind a canoe spilling over with plaster molds of bottles, rifles, beavers and hand mirrors.

The cache represents the detritus of the consumer culture that nearly destroyed Native tribes, Quick-to-See Smith said.

Precontact, the tribes navigated the rivers to trade with one another down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers in St. Louis.

"The bison went all the way up to Alaska and all the way down to Mexico," she said.

A bucket of plaster pills molded to resemble opiates sits awaiting placement.

"We give them back to the consumer society," Quick-to-See Smith added. "I'm giving back the stuff we don't want. I'm doing one with fry bread because it gives us diabetes and heart attacks."

A team of artists, including Quick-to-See Smith's son Neal Ambrose-Smith (Confederated Salish/Kootenai Nation), Matthew Eaton, Kelly Frye (Tesuque Pueblo) and David Beams (Choctaw) are busy fabricating Quick-to-See Smith's canoes, as well as molded and masked figures representing Mother Earth. The painting "State Names Map: Cahokia" and a single canoe will be shipped to Counterpublic 2023 in St. Louis.

Quick-to-See Smith formed the team at the urging of her New York gallery, the Garth Greenan in Chelsea. The pieces will feature brass plates with her name above those of her team. She's also preparing for upcoming exhibitions slated for the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. (as the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery) and in Edinburgh, Scotland.

The Whitney show "Memory Map" is the first-ever retrospective the institution has dedicated to a Native American artist. In the past, for her to gain entrance into a prominent museum show, someone else had to drop out.

"I was always plan B," she said.

Quick-to-See Smith credits the Black Lives Matter movement, the Standing Rock protests and the death of George Floyd for the sudden openness to nondominant cultures.

Despite 50 years of working, she said, "To me, it came really fast."

Quick-to-See Smith grew up on the Nisqually Reservation in Washington. Her father was alcoholic; her mother abandoned her.

She says her determination came from a cloud of survival.

"We had to go to the garbage bins for food," she said. Her mother "was 14 when she had me and she was 15 when she had my sister. It makes you scramble because you have to stay alive. That drives me. I suppose fear is part of it. Now I can see that things can change if I work really hard."

She was already molding and decorating mud pies as a little girl. She discovered crayons and tempera paint in first grade.

"I knew I was in the zone even though I didn't know the word."

Quick-to-See Smith was a migrant worker by the age of 8, then she worked in the canneries.

She attended junior college in Bremerton, Washington with men who entered on the G.I. Bill.

"The teacher said, 'You draw better than the men, but women can't be artists,' " she said.

The University of New Mexico Master in Fine Arts faculty rejected her four times.

"They kept telling me Native Americans don't go to fine arts schools. I was already showing in New York by then.

"I wanted to teach at IAIA (Santa Fe's Institute of American Indian Arts)," she added. "I wound up on the board."

Today her work draws from American pop art and abstraction to her own idiosyncratic use of a gallery of motifs, including maps, trade canoes, bison and techniques like collage. She has often reflected on the invasion of the Europeans, who arguably produced the most sustained genocide in human history.

"When they took over our country and forbid us to speak our language it was like a frontal lobotomy," she said. "Our language encompasses our whole holistic world."

Governmental and industrial abuse of the environment have been key concerns in Quick-to-See Smith's work

"I spent so much time outside as a kid," she said. "I was outside always. I was always immersed in the land. That is where I was alive."

She also loved museums, especially the works of Helen Frankenthaler and Joan Mitchell.

"They were painting with thick paint and large canvases," she said. "For me, that was heaven. That was my education."

Today she pens letters and petitions to stop the Biden administration's approval of the Willow Creek drilling project on Alaska's petroleum-rich North Slope.

"It's going to destroy the animals and fish," she said.

Read more about Jaune Quick-to-See Smith's groundbreaking retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum of American Art.