Making Medicine

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.

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.

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.

Garth Greenan Gallery is pleased to represent Jaune Quick-to-See Smith.