Pippy Houldsworth Gallery is delighted to announce representation of the estate of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, in partnership with Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.
Leading Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith laid the foundations for the long overdue recognition of many of her fellow Indigenous American artists with a series of her own firsts. In 2023, she was the first ever Native American artist to have a solo retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2020, she became the first Indigenous American artist to have a painting enter the collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington DC. This was followed in 2023 by an invitation from the museum to curate an exhibition honouring her artistic community, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. She was the first artist to curate an exhibition at the museum.
At Frieze London 2026, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery will exhibit Trade Canoe: Turtle Island (2024-25), a large-scale painting belonging to one of the artist’s most important series of work. The work recently featured centrally in Smith’s survey exhibition, Wilding, at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh. Next Spring, Storm King Art Center, New York, will mount an exhibition devoted to Smith’s Trade Canoe works.
Throughout Smith’s six-decade career, activism and education played a central role in a practice that critiqued the fetishisation and objectification of her culture. From its inception Smith focused on representing her Salish and Kootenai heritage. Following her graduation from the University of New Mexico in 1977, Smith and her peers formed the Grey Canyon collective, a group that strongly advocated for the representation of Indigenous artists. From 1979 to 1983 they staged what is considered to be the first major travelling exhibition of Native American artists across the United States, with venues including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, NM.
Works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith will be on view at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery’s booth at Frieze London, Booth A21.
photo: Jon Austria-Albuquerque Journal via ZUMA Press Wire/Alamy
