Garth Greenan Gallery is delighted to announce the representation of renowned painter, sculptor, and printmaker Neal Ambrose-Smith. A descendant of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, the New Mexico–based artist will first exhibit with Garth Greenan Gallery at the Armory Show in New York this September.
“Neal Ambrose-Smith is a visionary artist whose work poses important questions about the world with eye-opening humor, perceptiveness, and nuance,” says Garth Greenan. “Since my first encounter with Neal’s work, I have been captivated by the incredible skill, originality, and depth of his art, and I look forward to working together closely to bring his work to an even wider audience.”
Threaded throughout Ambrose-Smith’s technically masterful work is an intensely personal reflection on contemporary culture and politics. Borrowing from the maximalist strategies of postmodern collage, his work juxtaposes Native motifs, passages of gestural abstraction, and mass media imagery lifted from vintage comic books, clip art, and television screens. A rotating cast of characters—from Batman and Darth Vader to the Coyote trickster—act as allegorical ciphers, sardonically evoking themes of racism, environmental destruction, and the legacy of colonialism.
Beginning in the 1990s, Ambrose-Smith collaborated with his mother, the internationally recognized artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, on several significant sculptures and exhibitions.
Ambrose-Smith’s work is featured in the collections of many major museums, including the Boise Art Museum; Denver Art Museum; Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis; Flint Institute of Arts; Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe; Library of Congress, Washington DC; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; New York Public Library; Salish Kootenai College, Pablo, Montana; School of Art Institute, Chicago; University of Colorado, Boulder; University of Nevada, Reno; Whitney Museum of American Art.