📆 On display: February 29th – May 12th
⏰ Wednesday – Sunday: 10 am – 5 pm
📍 Seattle Art Museum: 1300 1st Ave, Seattle
🎟 $0 – $32.99
For as long as she can remember, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith knew she wanted to be an artist. Before she began curating exhibitions of art from contemporary Indigenous artists, before she formed the Grey Canyon Collective, and even before she spent nearly 16 years working towards her art degree whilst raising a family, the Indigenous artist, activist, and storyteller would keep pictures of animals in her pocket. Drawn by her father, who worked as a horse trader, these pictures, along with the landscapes she would see while traveling around the Pacific Northwest and California with him would later serve as inspiration for her practice.
Now five decades worth of her work will be on display from February 29th through May 12th in Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at the Seattle Art Museum. Drawing on maps’ abilities to tell stories, Smith takes a critical look at American life and identity, reframing it through Native lenses and recentering Indigenous perspectives. Smith’s work is bold and energetic, and both literally and metaphorically layered. Political motifs, symbols, and graphics overlap, and she often ties in humor and satire, exploring abstraction, expressionism, and pop art styles.
According to SAM, this is the “largest and most comprehensive retrospective of her work to date.” And the collection—over 130 of her works spanning her career—has traveled far: from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York to the Modern Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, and now its final stop on the tour is Seattle.
With three dynamic locations, Seattle Art Museum has been the center for visual arts in the Pacific Northwest since 1933.
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