Zimmerli Art Museum Opening Exhibition Of Contemporary Native American Art Curated By Recently Deceased Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940-2025; Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) passed away on Friday, February 24, 2025, following a battle with pancreatic cancer. She had been a driving force in contemporary Native American art since the mid-70s making work, organizing shows, uplifting other artists, networking, and constantly advocating for the genre on panels.

Through the decades, she collected people to her circle the way museums now collect her paintings. For Smith’s largest curatorial project, completed prior to her death, a massive exhibition opening at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ on February 1, 2025, she didn’t go any further than the contacts in her phone to fill out the roster of 97 artists.

“We know everybody in the show,” Smith’s son Neal Ambrose-Smith, who assisted on the effort, told Forbes.com in an interview conducted prior to his mother’s passing. “Not all of them have been to our house and had dinner, but a lot of them have. That’s just part of our community.”

Living in Corrales, NM on the northern edge of Albuquerque, Smith’s home was an annual meeting place during arguably the two most important Indigenous cultural celebrations in America: Albuquerque’s Gathering of Nations each April, North America’s biggest powwow, and Santa Fe Indian Market in August, the largest, oldest, and most prestigious Indigenous art fair in the world.

“People show up and they would stay. They’d camp out at our house. There’d be tents in the yard and campers caravaning,” Ambrose-Smith said.

Among the Native artists Jaune Quick-to-See Smith helped nurture are a who’s who of the most in-demand contemporary artists working in America today–Native or otherwise: Jeffrey Gibson, Raven Chacon, Wendy Red Star, Julie Buffalohead, Marie Watt, Rose B. Simpson, Cara Romero, Cannupa Hanska-Luger, Nicholas Galanin.

Superstars.

All have artwork included in “Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always,” on view at the Zimmerli through December 21, 2025. More than 100 pieces from jewelry to ceramics, beadwork, and basketry alongside painting, sculpture, and installation, with artists representing 74 distinct Indigenous nations across the United States.

In a twist of curation, Quick-to-See Smith asked artists to submit a piece of their choosing instead of requesting something specific.

“Working through the idea of identity and how each particular artist identifies is really up to them and not up to us,” Ambrose-Smith explained. “It goes along with how they represent themselves tribally as well. I have some friends that recognize themselves as Diné, and then I have other friends that recognize themselves as Navajo. They have their own reasons for that, but it’s not my decision to just say that they’re one or the other.”

Diné is the Navajo word for Navajo. Or perhaps Navajo is the Anglo word for Diné.

Embracing these distinctions, forwarding them as learning opportunities, is critical to the presentation.

“(As an artist) I feel responsible for the (Native) community in the sense of trying to educate,” Ambrose-Smith said. “I’m reminded of it on a regular basis. When I was trying to get my master’s degree, ‘Well, this doesn’t look Indian to me, so how is your work Indian?’ That was one of my crits. Stuff like that still is perpetuated.”

Like it or not, an added responsibility placed on Native Artists few others are obliged with is explaining their work and cultures and traditions to mainstream audiences totally unfamiliar or ignorant of them. Hand holding viewers through an artwork’s meaning. Artist plus cultural historian plus teacher.

Exhausting.

“Sure, but I can’t stop,” Ambrose-Smith said. “It’s not going to change if I stop, so I just have to keep going and hope that others will follow and make a difference. I was just talking to somebody that was on a board with an organization, and they said, ‘Wait a minute, I thought there was only a couple of Native tribes in the United States,’ that kind of thing. We haven’t been able to write our own history, somebody else wrote it for us, and that makes sense. It’s a colonial world, and if you’re dominated or colonized, the colonizers will write your history for you because that’s what they do.”

What the Smith’s have done is use their artwork and friends and curation to counter those common misunderstandings and stereotypes.

“There’s over 570 some-odd recognized tribes by the federal government; that’s a lot of languages and cultures. We don’t have the same religions and same languages across the United States, but some similar things we have had,” Ambrose Smith explained. “We can all relate to having a real estate problem. We can relate to tribalism and community and land and environment. Humor is a big one. There’s humor spattered throughout the work. Humor–it’s almost part of a religious belief or doctrine in the sense of its good medicine. It’s healthy to be able to come out of (historic mistreatment) and find the humor in it rather than poison yourself with negativity and stay mad. Hate is not something that we tend to have generally, that’s not part of our language.”

Native American Humor

On view concurrently with “Indigenous Identities,” “Hope with Humor: Works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith from the Collection” features nine works created between 1986 and 2001 showcasing her wit and optimism as a throughline of her practice honoring Indigenous survival and preserving Native cultures.

Ambrose-Smith, likewise, can deliver humor like a stinging jab as evidenced by his contribution to “Indigenous Identities.”

“It’s a teepee of all things. I was researching, like any good artist, art history, and I stumbled on Pier Paolo Calzolari’s Abstract in Your Home (1970) triangle, and I saw a teepee,” Ambrose-Smith said. “Oh my gosh, this is great! Here’s an Italian guy doing a teepee. It’s like Spaghetti Western again. That’s my identity and that’s how I view the world. He certainly wasn’t making a teepee, he was making a triangle that said Abstract in Your Home which I thought, ‘Well, I’m just going to steal it and make a teepee out of it, and I’ll make it better.’”

Among the numerous harmful stereotypes and reductions placed upon Native Americans by whites is the “stoic Indian” persona. Stoic equals quiet. Accepting. Compliant. A mute Indian, not an activist Indian or a satirical Indian, is the Indian settler colonialism desires and models as idyllic.

Humor, however, thrives among Native people. Ambrose-Smith uses humor in his artwork and his extensive outreach.

“I feel like that’s half my job, the education, and largely finding humor through the educational component has been helpful because people don’t respond to getting slapped in the face,” Ambrose-Smith said. “I understand because I don’t like it either, but I love to laugh, and any opportunity to get together and have a good laugh–which is what we do tribally, when we get together, we’re laughing.”

Contemporary Native American Art

Contemporary Native American Art has gone from under the radar to totally mainstream in an art historical blink of an eye. Ten years ago, even art world insiders would have been stumped to conjure an image of Jeffrey Gibson’s artwork in their brains. In 2024, he became the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale–the world’s most prestigious contemporary art exhibition–with a solo show.

Quick-to-See Smith became the first Native American artist with a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2020. The museum opened in 1937. She became the first Native American artist with a retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the nation’s most prestigious museum dedicated exclusively to American art, in 2023. The Whitney opened in 1931.

“For years, the media has portrayed us as a vanishing race and museums historically have ignored us,” Quick-to-See Smith said when the “Indigenous Identities” exhibition was announced. “It’s an interesting moment that we find ourselves in, having captured the attention of the art world. My hope with exhibitions like this one is to place Native Americans in our contemporary present and in every possible future.”

What changed?

“Sadly, but true, George Floyd and Standing Rock, there were these major events that brought a light over into Native America, and fortunately, we had enough Native artists to provide the art world with a new idea, a new thing to have, to check out, a new direction,” Ambrose-Smith said.

America’s recent partial awakenings to historic and ongoing abuses of minority populations fueled by racism and bigotry encouraged art museums, especially, to look to Native Artists for what they might have been missing. They’d been missing a great deal.

“It’s a no brainer in that sense,” Maura Reilly, Director of the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, told Forbes.com. “This work is phenomenal. The art world needed to catch up, but they weren’t looking. That’s a criticism I have with a lot of curators, they don’t do that extra homework and often regurgitate the same artists over and over again. Curators and gallerists are finally looking outside that very limited vision to now include Indigenous artists.”

The artists have always been there. Contemporary Native art’s meteoric rise in visibility since 2020 is akin to the “overnight success” band that has been grinding club shows for 20 years.

Smith and Kay WalkingStick and Dan Namingha and Doug Hyde and Anita Fields have all been making provocative artwork over the past nearly 50 years. They’ve been able to experience the mainstream breakthrough firsthand. Sadly, many colleagues and contemporaries have not. T.C. Cannon. Allan Houser. George Morrison. Oscar Howe. Earl Biss. Helen Hardin. All experienced success during their lifetimes, but none to the extent they should have.

Will it last?

“The New York art market is very fickle, and it does its own thing, it has its own rules, which there are no rules, and so we’re the new baby. We’re the new fun child,” Ambrose-Smith said. “As long as this wave flows, we’re going to ride it until it changes its mind.”

Audiences looking for more in northern New Jersey can find it at the Montclair Art Museum 35 miles north of New Brunswick where a complete reinstallation of the institution’s permanent collection of Native art debuted in September of 2024. Artwork by Smith and many of the “Indigenous Identities” artists is included.

The re-envisioned presentation centers Indigenous ways of knowing, promoting the power of Native peoples and art to shape the future. Structural updates to the space provide a fresh venue for the collection’s pieces from the 19th, 20th, and 21^st centuries, including regalia, ceramics, mixed media, basketry, paintings, works on paper, beadwork and quillwork, carvings, photography, and more.

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