‘Long overdue’: Fort Worth Modern presents first large-scale exhibit from a native artist

The indigenous artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is known for her dry humor, activist zeal and penetrating commentary. Her personality, and breadth of works, are evident in her first retrospective “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map,” now open at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

Included in the show, curated by the Whitney Museum of Art’s associate curator Laura Phipps and curatorial project assistant Caitlin Chaisson, are more than 130 objects spanning 50 years. Smith, a citizen of Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, lives in New Mexico.

The constant references to history and trauma experienced by indigenous communities sums up her work. The show debuts as museums rethink how they display Indigenous art, if any are in their collections at all. Indigenous work told a limited story, suggesting the greatest accomplishments were antique pots, vases and tribal ware.

Now, as the art world reckons with inequities in art history and their collections, Smith is among the artists finally getting recognition, or more than “lip service,” she said, at American museums. In short, that a museum is staging a solo show of an artist such as Smith is a big deal.

Her sculptures, drawings, paintings and installations stick with a handful of themes, namely relationships with nature, indigenous people’s relationship with the United States government and the violence perpetuated against indigenous people.

“Being Indigenous in making art means that you’re looking at the world through lenses that are curved or changed by your upbringing and by your worldview,” she said. She wants to reclaim and reinterpret that worldview through her art.

It’s why Phipps called Smith “not just an artist but an educator and activist and one of the most recognized indigenous artists of her generation.”

Colonization, cultural erasure and environmental degradation are confronted from all angles.

“Indian Madonna Enthroned, 1974,” which was reconstructed by her son, the artist Neal Ambrose-Smith, is a reimagined Indigenous woman as a Madonna.

The Madonna, her face in an oval golden frame, is sitting straight up, an American flag draped across her lap. She holds the book “God Is Red,” by Vine Deloria Jr., which contrasts Native religions and Christianity. On her back is a child, also framed, with the words “Property of the BIA”— or Bureau of Indian Affairs. The materials are as important as the message.

Where there’s the deeply serious Madonna, there’s also the tongue-in-cheek and biting “Celebrate 40,000 Years of American Art, 1995.”

To celebrate the fifth centennial of Columbus’s arrival in the Americas, Smith decided to spoof and celebrate 40,000 years of the land. A group of rabbits are dancing and holding hands. Celebrate 40,000 Years is written at the top with — boom — of American Art at the bottom.

She wanted an icon of United States commercialism, and set on the rabbit, with multiple meanings. She chose the standing rabbit. “In Native American culture, a rabbit is part of the creation story. I usually go forward, and then I look back. And I think that’s what I did here.”

A popular recurring work are her maps, which trace the original trails and tracks of native people within a reimagined map of the United States. One of the newer works, “Survival Map, 2021,” flips a map of the United States on its side. Draped in cloth, at the center of it are the words NDN humor causes people to survive.

The artist Jeffrey Gibson pointed out the “humor is really based in addiction, abuse, traumatic situations, but also love and attractive people and stories about Indians.”

Retelling these stories and bringing awareness to the problems facing indigenous people is one of the reasons Alison Hearst, a curator at the Modern and the show’s host curator, heralded the exhibit.

“Memory Map is the first exhibition to explore five decades of Jaune’s work in such depth. This highly overdue and essential exhibition also marks the first large-scale exhibition of a native artist’s work at the Modern, another extremely long overdue moment,” she said.

The show runs through Jan. 21, 2024.