The Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith joins Stephen Friedman Gallery
Over her fifty-year career, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith created drawings, prints, paintings and sculptures challenging America’s systemic injustices toward Native peoples. Combining appropriated imagery from commercial slogans and signage, art history and personal narratives, Smith’s work fuses a sharp humour with socio-political commentary addressing the oppression of Indigenous cultures. Her abstract landscapes, populated by maps, horses, and canoes, are overlayed with newspaper clippings, found imagery, and corporate logos, to create mixed media works which expose the overlooked history of her ancestors.
As well as a pioneering visual artist, Smith was a prominent curator and activist. Her commitment to advocating for Native artists was as integral to her practice as her own art and she worked tirelessly to break what she called the “buckskin ceiling”. Smith was the first Native artist to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (2020), and the first to have a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2023).
On 6 June 2025, Stephen Friedman Gallery will open Smith’s first solo exhibition in the UK: a historical survey of paintings and drawings with a room devoted to the paintings that the artist was working on at the time of her death.
Garth Greenan Gallery in New York will host a concurrent solo exhibition of Smith’s work which will include a new large-scale bronze sculpture. In November 2025, Fruitmarket in Edinburgh will open Wilding, the first posthumous exhibition of her work in a public institution.
Stephen Friedman Gallery co-represents the Estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith with Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
