Tierra Madre

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to announce Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Tierra Madre, an exhibition of paintings, works on paper, and one large-scale sculpture at 545 West 20th Street. Opening on Thursday, May 1, 2025, the solo exhibition is the artist’s first with the gallery since her death in January of this year. The show features a series of paintings that engaged the artist up to her final weeks.

Stephen Friedman Gallery, now the co-representative of the artist’s estate, will present a solo exhibition in London this June. Fruitmarket (Edinburgh, UK) will also mount Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Wilding in November—the first posthumous museum exhibition of her work.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s twelve-foot bronze, Making Medicine: Coyote (Going Forward, Looking Back) (2024–2025), is the culmination of a series she first began, in painting form, in the early-’90s. Smith recalled accounts of older Native Americans scarred from the “gifts,” like blankets, brought by settlers in canoes. It was under the guise of trade that these settlers dealt many of their deadliest blows, from smallpox to land expropriation. In the work, these barbed gifts—from syrup-flavored coffees to Christian sacramentals—are piled into a final canoe for symbolic return.

In Tierra Madre: Amy Bowers Cordalis (2024–2025), a female figure floats in the center of the composition with her palms facing outward. Plentiful salmon arch above her head—perhaps a reference to Cordalis’s conservation work on the Klamath river. In Tierra Madre: Maria Curie (2024–2025), the female is armless, but connected to all manner of symbolic forms: skulls, limbs, leaves, and horses. The compositions call to mind da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, a comparison that Smith made explicit in her 1992 The Red Mean: Self-Portrait. In contrast to da Vinci’s elevation of the singular, ideal (male) figure as the “measure of all things,” Smith positions the abstracted female form as the personification of nature itself, rather than a yardstick for creation. While each painting honors a specific woman, many of the Tierra Madres are faceless, egoless. For her decades of ceaseless advocacy for Native artists, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith no doubt belongs among this pantheon.

Born in 1940 in St. Ignatius, Montana, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. In 1980, she earned an MFA from the University of New Mexico. After the late 1970s, Smith had over 50 solo exhibitions, including at Kornblee Gallery (1979, New York), Bernice Steinbaum Gallery (1990, New York), Steinbaum Krauss Gallery (1992, 1995, 1998, New York), and Jan Cicero Gallery (2000 and 2002, Chicago). In 2004, the Milton Hershey School Art Museum (Hershey, Pennsylvania) opened Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Made in America, which traveled to Keene State College (Keene, New Hampshire). 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 exhibition of the artist’s work to date.

Quick-to-See Smith received numerous awards, such as the Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Award, New York, 1987; 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 Women’s Award, 2005; the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, 2005; 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.

Quick-to-See 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.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent the Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith with Stephen Friedman Gallery.