A Fair Trade

Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith says, “My work is about enlightening the larger community about Indian affairs today. I can’t do anything about the past, but I can do something about the present and future.” Smith was born in Montana on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Indian Reservation in 1940. She studied art education in Massachusetts and received her Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of New Mexico. Smith uses painting, collage, and images from popular culture and from other artists to create her works. She has been described as “a bridge builder” between cultures. She says, “My art, my life experience, and my tribal ties are totally enmeshed. I go from one community with messages to the other, and I try to enlighten people.” Inspired by artists like Pablo Picasso as well as traditional American Indian art, Smith’s work tends to address myths of American Indians in the context of current issues.

“My best hope is that a viewer sees something about the human condition, that might cause them to pause a moment and consider something like war,” says Jaune Quick-to-See Smith. Trade Canoe for Don Quixote focuses on a canoe, a traditional form of transportation among some American Indian tribes. Europeans and Americans eventually adopted canoes and used them to bring U.S. government policies into Indian country. According to Smith, this painting “moves the trade canoe to a more massive war canoe such as the ocean going canoes on the Pacific Rim. Besides the wars in the Middle East, perpetrated by the U.S., there are other issues that are fought politically in a war-like way. These issues might be as varied as a woman’s right to choose for her own body; healthy natural foods versus unhealthy processed foods that are controlled by massive corporate campaigns; the consumer culture issues which are controlled by international corporations versus living in a sustainable way …” In this painting, Smith has filled the trade canoe with war images from throughout history that, for her, represent some of these issues. She goes on to say, “Can we trade all this for peace, respect, kindness, friendship, sustainability, and a caring for our planet and all its inhabitants.”

Smith is strongly influenced by other artists and often references images from art history in her paintings. In Trade Canoe, Smith’s skeletons are rendered in a similar style to those of Mexican painter Jose Guadalupe Posada in his work Calavera de Don Quijote. Like Smith’s work, Posada’s artwork protested his government’s policies. Smith also painted images of faces and heads that are similar to those painted by Pablo Picasso in his famous painting Guernica, another piece filled with political commentary. She says, “I think that Picasso’s Guernica is one of the greatest pictures of war showing the suffering of humans and animals.”