After just piublishing the announcement of her representation by Stephen Friedman we bring news of Jaune Quick-to See Smith’s first posthumous exhibition in a public institution.
This Autumn Fruitmarket will host a major retrospective exhibition of work by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith from 8th November 2025 to 1st February 2026.
Artist, activist, educator and curator Smith was born in 1940 at the St Ignatius Mission on the Flathead reservation in western Montana, USA and was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. This exhibition was conceived in conversation with her over the last two years and – following her sad and sudden death at the beginning of 2025 – will be the first posthumous exhibition of her work in a public gallery or museum and the first time her work has been seen in Scotland.
Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
The exhibition’s title Wilding came from the artist, who was interested in wilding and rewilding projects, particularly in Scotland. Her tribe has links with Scotland through Charles Duncan McDonald (1897-1995), whose grandfather emigrated from Loch Torridon, Scotland in 1838, and who was a founding member of the Tribal Council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Throughout her fifty-year career, Smith made art; curated exhibitions; mentored fellow artists; and delivered workshops in schools and on reservations all of which worked together to bear witness to the past, present and future of Native Americans from a Native American perspective. Her paintings, prints, collages, sculptures and assemblages embody a deeply-felt hope for equality and mutual respect for land, nature and humans: ‘My work comes right from a visceral place – deep deep – as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take those feelings and attach them to the passer by? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try’. Smith was committed to the politics of land and land ownership and stewardship and asked questions concerning conservation and the climate crisis in and through her work: Who owns the land? Who takes care of it?
Fiona Bradley, Fruitmarket Director said:
Over the past two years we’ve been working with Jaune, her son Neal Ambrose-Smith and her gallery, Garth Greenan Gallery, towards this major exhibition of new and existing work. We had grown very fond of Jaune and are devastated to have to continue plans for the exhibition without her. However, we are proud to be bringing her ferocious intelligence and brilliant work to new audiences in Scotland in this exhibition that will celebrate her life, work and career-long mission to legitimise the work of contemporary Native American artists.
The exhibition includes paintings and a vast canoe sculpture Smith was making right up until her death, shown in the context of existing paintings. It opens with a selection of works from Smith’s Montana Memories series from 1988; mid-scale works that layer simple pictographs (bowls, garments, trees, horses) over abstract paintings; and continues with a room of extraordinary paintings from her I See Red series of works, selected to introduce an audience to some of the artist’s most important motifs – elk, bison, horse, teepee – and includes one of her compelling snow men:
Of course red symbolises anger, and Quick-to-See Smith says that I See Red […] is ‘commonly understood to mean being annoyed, being on fire, about issues that Natives deal with daily’. That sense of daily indignity points to another usage, as a demeaning label for Native Americans. But red is also significant in the dances and ceremonies of Indigenous cultures across the world, with red ochre often marking and protecting bodies and objects of importance. So, when Quick-to-See Smith takes a snowman – literally a white man whose position is temporary – and paints it red, she is choosing to re-colour the expectation of whiteness, to question the permanence of racial identity’ (Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where Quick-to-See Smith had a major exhibition in 2023.)
Further existing works include paintings which draw on a speech given by Chief Seattle, leader of Squamish and Duwarmish peoples in 1854 as he and other leaders from indigenous nations negotiated the Point Elliott Treaty. The speech, although there is some uncertainty as to the authenticity of the exact words, is a powerful plea for the rights of Native American peoples and respect for the land. The works Smith made with the speech echo this plea (All things on earth are connected …), as do other paintings from this time such as Indian Lands: Indian, Indio, Indigenous II (1992).
The selection of existing works in the exhibition ends with several of Smith’s masterful map paintings. Simple, direct, urgent and compelling, they overwrite and undermine the authority of the familiar map of the USA.
At the time of her death, the artist was working on the new works which complete the exhibition and bring it up to date, with the most recent made in early 2025. These include a large new canoe sculpture, three complex configurations of small framed drawings, and a selection of new paintings featuring Tierra Madre /Mother Earth female fertility figures and dedicated to a selection of activist women.
The exhibition is part of ‘Attached to Land’, Fruitmarket’s 2025-26 season of programming with an environmental focus. Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was devastated at the ravages humanity has wrought on the planet, and hoped that the exhibition might make a contribution to current debates around the climate crisis and inspire us to take steps to mitigate its harms.
There will be a major publication published to complement this exhibition with new writing offering new perspectives on and meaning for the work. Contributors include Lowery Stokes Sims, Lara Evans and Suzanne Fricke, with some observations from Jaune Quick to See Smith taken from conversations she recorded with Darragh McNicholas shortly before her death.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith Wilding, 8th November 2025 – 1st February 2026 Fruitmarket
About the artist
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025) was born at the St. Ignatius Indian Mission on her reservation and was an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana. Smith received an Associate of Arts Degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Washington in 1960, a BA in Art Education from Framingham State College, Massachusetts in 1976, and an MA in Visual Arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980.
The artist repeatedly overcame the immense headwinds of gender and race, deliberately clearing space for others as she went. Hers was the first painting by a Native artist to be acquired by the National Gallery of Art. In 2023, she became the first Native artist to be given a retrospective at the Whitney Museum when they mounted Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map—the most comprehensive exhibit of the artist’s work to date.
Smith received numerous awards such as the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, l987; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters Grant, 1996; the Women’s Caucus for the Arts Lifetime Achievement, 1997; the College Art Association Women’s Award, 2002; Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Woman’s Award, 2005; New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005. Art Table Artist Honoree, New York, 2011; Visionary Woman Award, Moore College, Pennsylvania, 2011; Elected to the National Academy of Art, New York, 2011; Living Artist of Distinction Award, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award, 2014; The Woodson Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, 2015, a United States Artists fellowship in 2020, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in 2021, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award in 2022, and the Artists’ Legacy Foundation Artist Award in 2023, among many others. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art, and the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
Smith’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Cornell Fine Arts Museum, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida; Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others. She is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery, New York and Stephen Friedman Gallery.
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