by Adela Lovric // Jan. 9, 2026
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s groundbreaking career as an artist, activist, curator and educator unfolded over more than four decades, driven by restless imagination and a pursuit of justice. She was still making new work in the months before her passing in January 2025, preparing for a solo exhibition now on view at the Fruitmarket in Edinburgh. Titled ‘Wilding,’ the show has become her first posthumous presentation, offering a cross-section of her practice—from works made in the 1980s to those she continued to develop until illness brought her labor to a halt.
A member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation, Smith was deeply concerned with Native Americans’ position and history in the United States, especially the issues of land sovereignty, racism and cultural preservation. Across her practice, she returned insistently to land and the environment, approaching them with a reparative vision rooted in Indigenous knowledge. One such fragment of ancestral wisdom is distilled in a single line—“All things of the Earth are connected”—written on ‘Red Cross (C.S. 1854),’ Smith’s 1989 mixed-media painting encountered on the gallery’s ground floor.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: ‘I See Red: Going Forward, Looking Back,’ 1996
Many of Smith’s works harness the power of language. In ‘Indian Lands: Indian, Indio, Indigenous II’ (1992), sardonic phrases such as “It takes hard work to keep racism alive” and “Money is green: it takes precedence over nature” are scrawled on a large-scale canvas layered with collaged elements—including a cut-out from the Flathead Reservation’s ‘Char-Koosta News’ and fragments of a US map. In ‘I See Red: Going Forward, Looking Back’ (1996), clippings from various indigenous nations’ newspapers reporting on community life strain for visibility beneath washes of paint. The artist’s rage at Native erasure and refusal to let historical injustice fade into the background is spelled out in the work’s title. Both paintings belong to Smith’s series ‘The Quincentenary Non-Celebration,’ which responds to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas by reframing the commemoration as a confrontation with the ongoing consequences of colonization.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (left to right): ‘War Is War,’ 2023, Courtesy Private collection, New York; ‘American Slang Map,’ 2023, Courtesy Arte Collectum; ‘American Citizens Map,’ 2021, Courtesy Collection Philip Holzer
In ‘American Slang Map’ (2023), part of a series in which the outline of the USA is overwritten with changing sets of words, Smith floods the canvas with identity labels, including racial slurs. The painting draws a pointed parallel between language and borders as colonial tools of erasure, control and dispossession. Across these bodies of work, by rewriting and remapping, Smith counters the colonial narrative with her own. In the exhibition catalogue, Fruitmarket’s director Fiona Bradley notes that Smith understood her paintings as stories—devices used to draw viewers into her world before confronting them with its truths. “I catch them off guard then smack them with it,” Smith remarked in one of their conversations, seemingly with no interest in softening the blow.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: ‘Indian Lands: Indian, Indio, Indigenous II,’ 1992 // Courtesy of Fruitmarket, Edinburgh
Over the decades, Smith’s work has invited comparisons to 20th-century European and US artists, Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Combines’ often coming to mind in relation to her mixed-media paintings. Yet, as Lara M. Evans notes in the exhibition catalogue, Smith’s practice is better understood as drawing from longstanding modes of material combination that are inherently Indigenous, while deliberately echoing formats familiar to Euro-American audiences. It is worth recalling that Rauschenberg, who was proudly one-quarter Cherokee, found inspiration in Native contemporaries, as well as in African American decorative assemblages rooted in West African traditions. Smith’s earlier refrain thus resonates here as well: “All things of the Earth are connected.”
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: ‘Coyote Stories Number 1 and 2,’ 1996-2025 (left); ‘All My Relations,’ 2025 (middle); ‘Trade Canoe: Turtle Island,’ 2024-2025 (right) // Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery
Preparing for her exhibition at Fruitmarket, Smith envisioned the gallery’s ground and upper floors as representing earth and sky, bridged by a long, suspended sculptural installation: a canoe carrying a host of animals, hovering above the staircase that connects the two levels. In the wake of the artist’s passing, the setting feels numinous. The thought of it as a symbol of a passage to the spirit realm, guided by more-than-human kin, keeps lingering in the mind. However, the motif of the canoe recurs in Smith’s practice. Her ‘Trade Canoe’ series of paintings, one of which is shown on Fruitmarket’s upper floor, focuses on this traditional mode of transportation as a symbol of trade and everything that came with it upon the settlers’ arrival: displacement, disease, broken treaties, pillage, environmental destruction and genocide. Simultaneously, it asserts the presence and resilience of Native peoples, carrying forward a vital philosophy that reveres the natural world and treats the land as a relative to be nurtured, not a resource to be exploited. ‘Wilding’ continues Smith’s dedication to voicing Native struggles past and present, dispelling degrading myths and stereotypes, and warning of ongoing ecological crisis while underscoring the importance of Indigenous approaches to environmental stewardship.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (left to right): ‘Tierra Madre: Amy Bowers Cordalis;’ ‘Tierra Madre: Wilma Mankiller;’ ‘Tierra Madre: Maria Sibylla Merian,’ 2024-25 // Courtesy Garth Greenan Gallery and Stephen Friedman Gallery
In late 2024, Smith started working on a series of paintings dedicated to women who shared her sensibilities and left indelible marks on the world—including Rachel Carson, Wangari Maathai, Wilma Mankiller and Marie Curie. These bold, large-scale paintings imagine the artist’s female kin in spirit as towering totems, dominating the upper gallery. Whether by intention or instinct, this body of work places Smith alongside brilliant women, claiming her place in their lineage of greatness. Throughout her career, she proved herself not only as a tireless advocate for others through her art, but also as a curator, championing the work of her Native peers through more than 30 exhibitions. As Fiona Bradley notes, the artist’s son Neal Ambrose-Smith described her as “the internet for Indian America”—she would run up $500 monthly phone bills while stitching together a far-flung network of artists across the US. Her legacy will last as a bridge between generations and cultures; a reminder that creativity, resistance and care for the land shape and sustain communities, challenging anyone who encounters her work to follow in her footsteps.
Exhibition Info
Fruitmarket
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: ‘Wilding’
Exhibition: Nov. 11, 2025-Feb. 1, 2026
fruitmarket.co.uk
45 Market St, Edinburgh EH1 1DF, UK, click here for map
