Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s Estate Joins Stephen Friedman Gallery

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith 1940-2025, United States Follow +

This June will mark the first solo exhibition in London for recently-passed Native American artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, with Stephen Friedman Gallery announcing it will represent her estate alongside New York‘s Garth Greenan Gallery.

The gallery will premiere a selection of Smith’s work at its London venue on 6 June, including never-exhibited paintings made shortly before her death—while a survey of the artist’s work, Wilding, is planned for Edinburgh contemporary art space Fruitmarket from August.

This follows Smith’s death in January at the age of 85 after an illustrious 50-year career, producing drawings, paintings, and assemblages responding to America’s mistreatment of Native people and advocating for Indigenous rights.

I See Red: Target (1992)—a three-metre-tall painting crowned with a dartboard—critiqued American appropriation of Native culture, including by artists like Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns, with the work explicitly referencing the latter’s Target (1958).

Alongside making art, Smith curated exhibitions promoting contemporary Native art and challenging its limited representation as traditional crafts. In 1982, she convinced over 30 galleries in U.S. metropolitan areas to showcase Native artists’ work.

More recently, she organised the 2023 exhibition The Land Carries our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., featuring some 50 intergenerational Native artists from across the United States.

The gallery said the exhibit will bring together a historical survey of paintings and drawings, with a room devoted to paintings Smith was working on at the time of her death. —[O]

Main image: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Stephen Friedman Gallery (London/New York) and Pandora BoxX Project. Photo: Grace Roselli.