Dr. Anne Showalter and Dr. Beth Harris discuss Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s State Names (2000) at the Smithsonian American Art Museum
What’s in a map? With State Names, the Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith suggests that thinking about our history in a different way, helps us rethink our present.
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:04] We’re here in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, looking at a painting by Jaune Quick-To-See Smith called “State Names.” You immediately recognize the outline of the United States, but at the same time, that map is obscured and made difficult to read. It’s at once recognizable and not recognizable.
Dr. Anne Showalter: [0:25] Something that Smith does in her work is she works with these icons, these images that are instantly recognizable. What she does with them is then she adds a twist. She describes her use of icons as a ploy, as something that brings the viewer closer, and they think they know what they’re going to see. Then, once they’re there, something else happens.
Dr. Harris: [0:45] There are a lot of state names that are indicated here in this type that’s large and feels very educational, but some are clearly missing.
Dr. Showalter: [0:53] Some of the names that are present are obscured and then some of the names of the states are missing altogether. And so, one of the questions that often comes up fairly soon after you start to engage with this work is why do we see the names of some states but not other states?
[1:08] “State Names” is a work about the etymology of the names of US states. The states that are remaining in the work, these are names of states that come from Indigenous sources. The states that have been removed, those are names that have European origins.
Dr. Harris: [1:25] The outlines of the states are largely obscured.
Dr. Showalter: [1:29] Names are missing, boundaries are obscured, there’s dripping paint. You get a sense that what we’re looking at is a contested space in a lot of ways. And so when you see the dripping paint, what does that evoke? Is it blood? Is it tears? Is something melting?
Dr. Harris: [1:46] We’re reminded that these state boundaries are not ones that were at all relevant to Native American peoples.
Dr. Showalter: [1:53] It does reinforce how arbitrary those boundaries are. Smith has said that her maps are points of departure for the political treatment of Native people. She has also said that she cannot say strongly enough that her maps are about stolen lands.
Dr. Harris: [2:10] When I think about the map of the United States, I tend to read it the way I learned it in elementary school, from right to left, from the settling of the Eastern Seaboard to 13 colonies, and then [the] Westward Expansion. I’m immediately part of a historical narrative that looks back to Manifest Destiny.
Dr. Showalter: [2:31] Even the term “Westward Expansion” is asserting a particular point of view. Is it Westward Expansion or is it Eastern Invasion? Smith has said that she likes to use maps because maps can tell stories, so what stories are being told? Who’s telling the stories? She’s interested in telling a particular story from a particular point of view.
[2:49] Smith has been a leading contemporary American artist since the 1970s, and she works in a variety of media. Smith is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation. She began making maps for exhibitions that were responding to the Columbus quincentennial in 1992.
Dr. Harris: [3:11] So directly related to the beginnings of European colonization in North America.
Dr. Showalter: [3:16] Smith was trained as an Abstract Expressionist, and we may think of maps and Jasper Johns. We may think of collage, because what she has here, the names of the states, those are clippings that are then put over the paint, and then the paint is put over the clippings. We have these really rich layers in this work.
Dr. Harris: [3:33] “State Names” was created in 2000, half a century after Pollock and Johns and Rauschenberg, and artists who so evidently had an impact on her work, but she’s drawing on that art historical mid-20th century tradition to say something about her own identity and the identity of her people.
Dr. Showalter: [3:53] Her work really challenges us to think about identity in different ways, about heritage in different ways, about history in different ways.
Dr. Harris: [4:01] I notice too that we don’t just have state names, we have the names of areas outside of the boundaries of the United States.
Dr. Showalter: [4:10] The boundaries between states, it’s a very arbitrary distinction, as is the boundaries between countries here. And so while the work is called “State Names,” we have the top of Mexico just below the southern border of the United States. We have the bottom part of Canada.
Dr. Harris: [4:24] It’s interesting to me too how she’s chosen to make the oceans black. That gives it a very ominous feeling to me.
Dr. Showalter: [4:34] The dripping paint combined with the black oceans really does contribute to this ominous feel. Once you look at a work like “State Names,” you might not think about the name Arizona, or Ohio, or Nebraska in the same way, because you’re thinking about the history of that name.
[4:49] When we think about our history in a different way, it also asks us to think about our present in a different way.
[4:53] [music]
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
A Non-Celebration
As a response to the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in North America in 1992, the artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, from the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, created a large mixed-media canvas called Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People). Trade, part of the series “The Quincentenary Non-Celebration,” illustrates historical and contemporary inequities between Native Americans and the United States government.
Trade references the role of trade goods in allegorical stories like the acquisition of the island of Manhattan by Dutch colonists in 1626 from unnamed Native Americans in exchange for goods worth 60 guilders or $24.00. Though more apocryphal than true, this story has become part of American lore, suggesting that Native Americans had been lured off their lands by inexpensive trade goods. The fundamental misunderstanding between the Native and non-Native worlds—especially the notion of private ownership of land—underlies Trade. Smith stated that if Trade could speak, it might say: “Why won’t you consider trading the land we handed over to you for these silly trinkets that so honor us? Sound like a bad deal? Well, that’s the deal you gave us.”1
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, canoe (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
For Trade, Smith layered images, paint, and objects on the surface of the canvas, suggesting layers of history and complexity. Divided into three large panels, the triptych (three part) arrangement is reminiscent of a medieval altarpiece. Smith covered the canvas in collage, with newspaper articles about Native life cut out from her tribal paper Char-Koosta, photos, comics, tobacco and gum wrappers, fruit carton labels, ads, and pages from comic books, all of which feature stereotypical images of Native Americans. She mixed the collaged text with photos of deer, buffalo, and Native men in historic dress holding pipes with feathers in their hair, and an image of Ken Plenty Horses—a character from one of Smith’s earlier pieces, the Paper Dolls for a Post Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by US Government from 1991-92.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, toys and souvenirs (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
She applied blocks of white, yellow, green, and especially red paint over the layer of collaged materials. The color red had multiple meanings for Smith, referring to her Native heritage as well as to blood, warfare, anger, and sacrifice. With the emphasis on prominent brushstrokes and the dripping blocks of paint, Smith cited the Abstract Expressionist movement from the 1940s and 50s with raw brushstrokes describing deep emotions and social chaos. For a final layer, she painted the outline of an almost life-sized canoe. Canoes were used by Native Americans as well as non-Native explorers and traders in the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth century to travel along the waterways of North America. The canoe suggests the possibility of trade and cultural connections—though this empty canoe is stuck, unable to move.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, toys and souvenirs (detail), Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), 1992, oil paint and mixed media, collage, objects, canvas, 152.4 x 431.8 cm (Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia) © Jaune Quick-to-See Smith
Above the canvas, Smith strung a clothesline from which she dangled a variety of Native-themed toys and souvenirs, especially from sports teams with Native American mascots. The items include toy tomahawks, a child’s headdress with brightly dyed feathers, Red Man chewing tobacco, a Washington Redskins cap and license plate, a Florida State Seminoles bumper sticker, a Cleveland Indian pennant and cap, an Atlanta Braves license plate, a beaded belt, a toy quiver with an arrow, and a plastic Indian doll. Smith offers these cheap goods in exchange for the lands that were lost, reversing the historic sale of land for trinkets. These items also serve as reminders of how Native life has been commodified, turning Native cultural objects into cheap items sold without a true understanding of what the original meanings were.
The Artist
The artist was born on January 15, 1940, at the St. Ignatius Jesuit Missionary on the Reservation of the Flathead Nation. Raised by her father, a rodeo rider and horse trader, Smith was one of eleven children. Her first name comes from the French word for “yellow” (jaune), a reminder of her French-Cree ancestors. Her middle name “Quick-to-See” was not a reference to her eyesight but was given by her Shoshone grandmother as a sign of her ability to grasp things readily. From an early age Smith wanted to be an artist; as a child, she had herself photographed while dressed as Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. Though her father was not literate, education was important to Smith.
National Bison Range (near St. Ignatius, Flathead Reservation) (photo: Jaix Chaix, Check All Home Inspection Corp., CC BY-SA 2.0)
She received a bachelor of arts from Framingham State College in Massachusetts in 1976 in art education rather than in studio art because her instructors told her that no woman could have a career as an artist, though they acknowledged that she was more skilled than the men in her class. In 1980 she received a master of fine arts from the University of New Mexico. She was inspired by both Native and non-Native sources, including petroglyphs, Plains leger art, Diné saddle blankets, early Charles Russell prints of western landscapes, and paintings by twentieth-century artists such as Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Willem DeKooning, Jasper Johns, and especially Kurt Schwitters and Robert Rauschenberg (see image below). Both Schwitters and Rauschenberg brought objects from the quotidian world into their work, such as tickets, cigarette wrappers, and string.
Robert Rauschenberg, Canyon, 1959, oil, pencil, paper, metal, photograph, fabric, wood, canvas, buttons, mirror, taxidermied eagle, cardboard, pillow, paint tube and other materials, 207.6 x 177.8 x 61 cm (The Museum of Modern Art, New York) © 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation
In addition to her work as an artist, Smith has curated over thirty exhibitions to promote and highlight the art of other Native artists. She has also lectured extensively, been an artist-in-residence at numerous universities, and has taught art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico the only four-year university dedicated to teaching Native youth across North America. In her years as an artist, Smith has received many honors, including an Eitelijorg Fellowship in 2007, a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to create a comprehensive archive of her work, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts, the College Art Association’s Committee on Women in the Arts award, the 2005 New Mexico Governor’s award for excellence in the arts, as well as four honorary doctorate degrees.
Smith’s art shares her view of the world, offering her personal perspective as an artist, a Native American, and a woman. Her work creates a dialogue between the art and its viewers and explores issues of Native identity as it is seen by both Native Americans and non-Natives. Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People) restates the standard narratives of the history of the United States, specifically the desire to expand beyond “sea to shining sea,” as encompassed in the ideology of Manifest Destiny (the belief in the destiny of Western expansion), and raises the issue of contemporary inequities that are rooted in colonial experience.
