Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: An American Modernist

2: Seeing Red: Indigenous Identity and Artistic Strategy

17 Chapter Two Seeing Red Indigenous Identity and Artistic Strategy Painting out the white of the snowman for a red one is a political act. —Jaune Quick-to-See Smith ▲▼▲ For Smith the relationship of color and subject matter is diverse and complicated, especially when she is using red pigment. Its meaning is never fixed and oscillates, like its value and saturation, in each work of art. Manipulating red in multiple ways, the artist opens the possibility of complex meanings, which in turn suggests a multiplicity of unique viewers and interpretations. Smith strategically deploys red as metaphor and signifier in her visually exquisite and rhetorically fraught artwork. She uses it to invoke memories of nature and culture, to represent conflicted and partitioned lands, and to signify both proud identity and demeaning label, as well as to express a heritage of violence. Smith personally defines red, which is a floating signifier, a tool for inscribing her specific and complex experiences into the history of American modern art. In this chapter I look closely at how Smith exploits the color red to assert both identity and difference in the discourse of American art.1 Red is a dominant hue in Smith’s Montana Memories series, comprising twenty-four paintings created between 1988 and 1989. The color red is an expressive medium for the artist’s personal and cultural memories of her birthplace in the Plateau region of the North American continent. Yet the abstract, gestural, and luminous hues of red dripped paint resonate with the predominant style and medium of the modern New York art world where they were first shown.2 Smith’s hand is palpably present in the heavily worked pigment; color and image emerge in several layers on the powerfully concentrated and complex surface of each canvas in the series. Formally, the range of reds—which unifies the series— is central to each composition, while the titles and visual imagery specifically 18 Chapter Two situate the artist’s experiences and memories. In Salish Spring (1988–89), the color red emerges optically from layered, mixed, scumbled, and scraped paint and wax (plate 5). Even the perception of black and white is formed in a complex thatch of horizontal and vertical brush strokes of charcoal grey, white, red, ochre, and green. The black organic forms advance and hover over the divided picture plane in pictographs that represent people, animals, and flowers, situating the artist’s personal and cultural memories over the divided landscape of Montana. Each of the large-scale paintings is separated into a distinct composition of rectangles, which Smith describes as a reference to the boundaries of the Indian reservations created and enforced by the U.S. government, making each canvas a partitioned mix of memory that includes the darker legacy of cultural contact and conflict and reminding the viewer that each moment of reverie also includes a reference to loss.3 For example, The Spaniard (1988) complicates the reminiscent and celebratory nature of the series with memories of the invasion and conquest that always mark the end of precontact indigenous life (plate 6). The painting is also a bridge from the memories of her Montana homeland to her adopted home in New Mexico, where she created the series. In the lower section of the divided canvas, figures of opposing cultural forms, a Spanish horse and an indigenous canoe, are scratched into the scumbled earth tones of brown and yellow, inflected with reds, green, and white. They represent the invasive marks made by the sixteenth-century Spaniards on the ancient indigenous petroglyphs at El Morro, the site in New Mexico that inspired this painting. The graffiti carved into the living rock of the landscape violently announced the presence of the invading forces as they progressed north, defacing the sacred site with the date of their arrival. Gifts of Red Cloth (1989) evokes the red cloth that invaders brought to this continent (plate 7). The brilliant fibers of these trade goods inspired indigenous weavers to unravel, respin, and reweave the commercial yarn into textiles of their own making. At the same time, the cloth has a darker resonance in stories of the infectious diseases it carried, as lethal as any weapons used against the indigenous populations of North America—only this weapon did not distinguish between combatants and innocents. This paradox of a cloth that could simultaneously warm and kill its recipient is at the heart of Smith’s project to express the deep complexity of the encounters between the...