Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Making Medicine, an exhibition of recent works at 545 West 20th Street. Opening on Thursday, April 12, 2018, the exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery. Five of Smith’s thickly impastoed, mixed-media paintings will be on view, as well as two of her canoe-frame sculptures.

The exhibition will include three of Smith’s Trade Canoe paintings, a series she began in the early-’90s. Smith recalls her father’s stories from childhood of older Native Americans—survivors, scarred from accepting blankets and other provisions from settlers in canoes. It was under the guise of “trade” that colonizers dealt many of their deadliest blows, from smallpox to land theft.

Works like Trade Canoe: Ghost Canoe (2017) foreground contemporary concerns, like climate change, amidst unrelenting commerce. The canoe, flanked by butterflies and bees, is loaded with bison petroglyphs, skeletal remains and Wile E. Coyote slyly eyeing the viewer. This Noah’s Arc of American commercialism drifts onwards, perhaps fatally, as collaged text provides ominous reminders of our environment’s imperiled future. One characteristically glib headline pulled from a newspaper reads “What if the Iceberg is Just the Tip of the Iceberg?”

Her sculptural work, ostensibly celebrating the now ubiquitous Native American foodstuff, is similarly layered. The Navajo and Apache made the first fry bread from scant government provisions during the notorious Long Walk in 1864—a 400-mile, 18-day forced march away from their homelands during which many died. The bread is at once a symbol of cultural resilience and adaptability even as it is a reminder of immense cruelty.