Oct 27 2018 - Feb 10 2019
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College
Colorado Springs, CO
Quick-to-See Smith was born in St. Ignatius on the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Reservation. She is an enrolled member of the Flathead Nation, and descended from French, Cree, and Shoshone ancestors. She has lived in New Mexico since the late 1970s, working as an artist, teacher, lecturer, curator, and activist—or, as she describes, “a cultural arts worker.” She uses humor and satire to examine myths, stereotypes and the paradox of American Indian life in contrast to the consumerism of American society. Her work is philosophically centered by her strong traditional beliefs and political activism.Her creative voice and her powerful commitment to social, environmental, and political issues have established her as a dominant figure in contemporary American art. Yet she continues to maintain vital connections to Montana and American Indian culture.
Art historian Carolyn Kastner wrote that Quick-to-See Smith’s art is “always contingent, conditional, and historical….Her own complex identity is the starting point, her target is the point of complexity in each viewer, and her goal is to create a moment of recognition, agitation, and, finally, comprehension. Visualizing and representing cultural identity is not the end in itself, but rather her method of pointing to the problem of representation—how an artist expresses specific and differing perspectives on history, gender, and the notion of race to incite response and action.”
Quick-to-See Smith has been an instrumental and visionary advocate for MAM, helping to establish MAM’s Contemporary American Indian Art Collection with a promised gift of her entire printed oeuvre, as well as many other original works of her own and by other American Indian artists. In the Footsteps of My Ancestors is part of a series of exhibitions dedicated to groundbreaking work by contemporary American Indian artists. The exhibition is part of a forum titled Convening Indigenous Voices that takes place in two parts.
Smith is internationally known as an artist, curator, lecturer, printmaker and professor. She was born at St. Ignatius Mission on her Reservation and is an enrolled Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation of Montana. She holds four honorary doctorates from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Mass College of Art and the University of New Mexico.
Her work is in collections at the Whitney Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Walker, the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Recent awards include a grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation to archive her work; the 2011 Art Table Artist Award; Moore College Visionary Woman Award for 2011; Induction into the National Academy of Art 2011; Living Artist of Distinction, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, NM 2012; the Switzer Award for 2012; NAEA Ziegfeld Lecture Award 2014; Honorary Degree, Salish Kootenai College, Montana 2015; Alumni Achievement Award, Framingham State University, MA. 2016.