Half Arts

Review: Jaune Quick-to-See Smith at the Whitney Museum

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map

Apr 19–Aug 13, 2023

Whitney Museum, New York

https://whitney.org/exhibitions/jaune-quick-to-see-smith

“Whether art becomes politically relevant or indifferent... depends on the extent to which art's constructions and montages are at the same time de-montages, i.e. dismantlements that appropriate elements of reality by destroying them, thus freely shaping them into something else... Art that succeeds in doing this has a prerogative: it may dismiss the question posed by political practitioners as to what it is up to and what its 'message' is.” Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Back then I was hanging with my Black friends and mentors in the Movement, and one of them was carrying on about how tough it is to be Black in a White world, when another friend piped up, “I know what you mean, I’m part Black myself.”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is not part anything herself, in fact she’s got impeccable Tribal yichus. “Citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation:” it’s in the signage for her retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Also: Métis and Shoshone, Cree perhaps. Don’t try pulling an Elizabeth Warren.

She’s neither half-this or half-that, but the art is. At best it comes across as pleasant mid-sixties formalism: