If any single person is responsible for the momentum that contemporary Native American art is having at this moment it is Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, enrolled Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes). This is, at least, one of the central takeaways of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map, which traces five decades of Smith’s career as both one of the leading artists and influential curators of Contemporary Native American art. The retrospective is an exciting, nearly dizzying, display of Smith’s artistic oeuvre that provides a textural depth to the artist’s career for those familiar with her work while still being a welcoming introduction for those encountering Smith’s art for the first time. The accessibility of the show is due mostly to Smith’s art itself, which provides innumerable aesthetic and intellectual inroads to understanding the overarching themes of colonial disruption, Indigenous resilience, and ecological responsibility through vignettes of Smith’s anticapitalistic sentiment, Salish Kootenai knowledge, and critiques of Western art history. Ultimately, Memory Map overwhelms us with the work of an artist whose life’s work has engendered a sense of Native place and belonging with the contemporary art world.

As the exhibition title suggests, Memory Map is a collection and recollection of Smith’s over eighty years of memories and experiences, with the artist representing colonial histories and contemporary politics through both Salish ways of being and a wider Native American worldview. Curated by Laura Phipps, from the Whitney Museum, the exhibition contextualizes and enriches Smith’s art through a sweeping layout as the show chronologically and thematically traces a portrait of Smith as a consummate artist-activist and artist-curator. Paraphernalia from Smith’s curatorial interventions, such as brochures and candy from the quincentennial exhibition Submuloc show/Columbus wohs, frame the main entry points to the galleries and punctuate the importance of the artist’s role as a curator. Additionally, at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), where this reviewer saw the show on its over year-long tour through three US cities, Phipps and SAM curator Theresa Papanikolas ensure that decades worth of the artist’s works, thoughts, and themes are visible from any given vantage point in the exhibition.

The ability to view multiple galleries and dozens of artworks at once constantly reiterates the interconnectedness of Smith’s art, life, curation, and activism. Much like Smith’s artistically layered and textually dense artworks, there is no single experience of the exhibition. With multiple entryways to any gallery or niche, visitors can experience the show in any direction and order, encountering Smith’s earliest artworks alongside some of her most recent creations. The layout often forces people to double back past artworks they have already seen to access corners they missed, which always resituates the cumulative experience of Smith’s art. Consequently, the curatorial choices stress the deep relationality between artworks often separated in creation by decades, imparting the persistence of the issues faced by Indigenous Americans and Smith’s dedication to articulating her experiences of and responses to the colonial pressures of contemporary Native life.

One such revelatory moment for this reviewer was while standing in an open, octagonal “room” near the center of the exhibition containing Smith’s Memories of Childhood series (1994). The nine collages in this space recount the people, culture, and landscape that the artist grew up with as well as her imaginative dreams, such as flying as a butterfly, becoming an artist, and knowing her mother’s face. In the prints, Smith often situates herself among the flora and fauna of the places she grew up. Washingtonians will feel comfortable among Smith’s remembrances of living alongside Western Red Cedars, Blue Huckleberry, Camas, Douglas Firs, and Yew trees while those from Big Sky country might recall the time they too slept under the stars among the Lodgepole Pines. Simultaneously, while visitors wander the representational landscapes of Smith’s childhood memories, they can see dozens of the artist’s most iconic artworks and motifs through the four missing walls of the octagonal space.

In the view to the north sits Trade (Gifts for Trading Land with White People), a title which references the apocryphal tale of the Lenape selling Manhattan to the Dutch for a handful of beads. The triptych is collaged with found paper materials and overlayed with a painterly canoe while a string of commercial items from the 1990s that depict the Indian stereotypes sits above the canvases: a Braves’ terry towel, two Redskins’ ball caps, several colleges’ bumper stickers, six different Indian costume items including a plastic tomahawk, seven beaded fashion accessories, some liquor shooters, and one doll. To the east and south sit Trade Canoe: Making Medicine (2018)—cocreated with Smith’s son Neal Ambrose-Smith—and Tongass Trade Canoe (1996). The two trade canoes, though separated by over two decades and different mediums, both consider how the impact of colonialism has disrupted Native ways of being, especially around food sovereignty and security.

Finally, or firstly, at the exhibition entrance in the west sits Indian Madonna Enthroned (1974). Reminiscent of Edward Kienholz’s The Wait (1964), the sculpture portrays an American Indian Movement (AIM) era woman who has a heart of maze, carries her child in a cradleboard on her back, and holds Vine Deloria Jr.’s seminal book God is Red in her hand. Consequently, this Madonna epitomizes Smith’s view of contemporary Native identity as she bridges tradition, politics, and futurity. Moreover, with a trading canoe—a motif Smith has used for over three decades—visible in all four cardinal directions, Smith further closes the temporal distances between some of the earliest events of colonial history, her life’s experiences, and contemporary Native resurgence.

By articulating how deeply intertwined personal experiences are with the historical, political, and cultural pressures of colonialism, Memory Map’s network-like web of artwork creates its own kind of cartography of Smith’s personhood. Seneca scholar Mishuana Goeman calls this a Native narrative map in her 2013 book Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. Goeman explains, “Unlike Western maps whose intent is often to represent the “real,” Native narrative maps . . . are not absolute but instead present multiple perspectives—as do all maps,” (Goeman, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013: 25). Just in the examples above, Smith’s atlases her reality through critical colonial history, radical Native politics, Indigenous world views, and her own intimate dreams. As a result, the space of the exhibition creates Smith’s memory map by emphasizing the personal, cultural, and historic stories the artist continuously tells through her art and curation.

The arrival of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map at the Seattle Art Museum marked a kind of coming home for the eighty-four-year-old artist. Having spent many of her child and adolescent years in and around Seattle, Smith’s connection to the Duwamish and Coast Salish lands the SAM now occupies is evident. Seattleites will enjoy spying Smith’s witty appropriations of formline, reading quotes from Chief Seattle’s famous 1854 speech, and learning about her contributions to the West Seattle Cultural Trail. For those not from the Pacific Northwest, or who saw Memory Map in either New York City or Fort Worth, Texas, Smith’s paintings, sculptures, and prints always reward those who take the time to look closely at them. A visitor could happily spend several hours reading the decades-old news articles pasted into Smith’s painting, following the reoccurrence of phrases, characters, and visual motifs across multiple artworks, and reveling in the artist’s interpolation of the Western art canon.

If this reviewer does have any critique of Memory Map it is the sprawling mass of the show, with over one hundred and thirty objects in the exhibition. The size and expanse of the exhibition are necessary to adequately showcase the five-decade career of such a prolific artist. However, combined with the density of Smith’s art, Memory Map might threaten to overwhelm the casual museumgoer.

Simultaneously, it is also because of the exhibition’s critical mass that even just a cursory visit imparts the weight and complexity of Indigenous peoples’ experiences of dispossession and oppression under colonialism. Smith is an incredibly deft communicator as she introduces and expands viewers’ understanding of a variety of interconnected topics, such as forced relocation and assimilation’s effects on Native cultures and the ongoing problem of the environment’s destruction under colonial capitalism. In many ways, the discursive didacticism of Smith’s art is produced through the visual and textual density of her oeuvre, not despite it. Consequently, every vignette, story, and prescient message Smith shares is worth absorbing. Memory Map has an exceptional sense of being thereness for the past fifty years of Native American art and activism that few individuals—Smith being one of them—could offer, and a generation of artists and art lovers are indebted to the landscapes she imagined.