Continuing the Art of Play
July 26 + August 2, 2023

Artist: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Join Zoom Meeting / Class
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87618016665

When I met paint, it was an epiphany.

-Jaune Quick-to-See Smith-

About

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is a Native American visual artist and curator. She is an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes and is also of Métis and Shoshone descent. She is also an art educator, art advocate, and political activist.

Wikipedia

Whitney | Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

Wikipedia

Smithsonian

The Art Newspaper

The Profound Work of Artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

This will be a 2-week project.

Please download and print the blank map of the USA to use for the warm-up.

Warm-up
Alter and complete this map in any way you wish, using any and all additional materials. Play with paint, color, collage or other materials that might appeal to you. You may make a statement or simply have fun with using different mediums and ideas.

Project:
The project will follow and may be informed by what was learned during the warm-up process.

Paper Dolls

Via Whitney Museum of Modern Art

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s series of paper dolls arises both from an interest in the transhistorical human activity of play as well as the artist’s own family history of boarding school education and domestic labor. There is an almost deceptive whimsicality to Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World with Ensembles Contributed by the US Government (1991). The series title, shaded in lighthearted watercolor hues of blue, pink, and yellow, offers an ironic frame for the works that follow, an irony that troubles more and more as the text interacts with the pencil-drawn images.

The dolls are rendered with a comic strip–like iconography and colored with alternatingly vibrant and muted tones. The first character presented is the Jesuit priest, signaling both the contact between Europeans and the Salish and the nineteenth-century founding of the St. Ignatius Mission in Montana, where the artist was born. The other figures constitute a Native family, their names a combination of a Salish Kootenai family name and those of the most famous of dolls, Ken and Barbie. These references and the money symbols on the title image indicate Smith’s persistent interest in the capitalist mode of exchange and its damaging effects for Indigenous peoples and their lands.

Who gets to play and who has to work? The Flathead child’s boarding school outfit tells part of the narrative of the conscription of Native people—first into religious education and then into “good” jobs as day laborers. The sting of the qualifier “good” is echoed in the maid’s uniform, perhaps to be donned by Barbie Plenty Horses after her “good education at Jesuit school.” 

As the paper doll series illustrates, play is a space for rearranging our identities. In the United States, children and adults alike often delight in appropriating Indigenous dress to feel exotic and free. Smith reappropriates the appropriators, using the dolls to relay a dark story dripping in sarcasm. The final image, a headdress, represents one collected by white people and sold for thousands of dollars at auction. While the headdress is desired, the matching smallpox costumes in this series, it can be assumed, would not be so readily adopted as a desirable costume. The cutting humor in these works does not overshadow the historical facts mentioned—including the nineteenth-century Garfield Treaty that ultimately forced the Salish onto the Flathead Reservation in 1891—but like the bright pinks throughout the drawings, Smith’s sardonic twists of phrase and image revel in the ability of Native peoples to both address and reinvent colonial conditions not of their making.

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