Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, a federally recognized tribe in Montana, United States. Her practice is deeply rooted in Indigenous visual traditions while also engaging with contemporary pop culture, political discourse, and art historical narratives.

In Montana Memories: Prairie Summer, Smith explores the legacies of Modernism in contemporary painting. The work’s textured surfaces and geometric arrangements recall the visual language of Swiss-German artist Paul Klee, whose use of glyphs, signs, and invented symbols — often drawn from African and Indigenous sources — played a pivotal role in the development of abstraction in the early twentieth century.

Smith reclaims and reorients such influences, embedding Indigenous aesthetics and cultural memory within her compositions. Through irony and inversion, she critiques the appropriation found in Western European art and provocatively imagines a reversal: what if Modernism were not the origin but the echo?