Not even the art world could make her lose her sense of humor.
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To her left was a pile of notebooks, in which she collects words and phrases.
She read from one: Canoes.
Thumbing through another, she found a note to self: Land acknowledgment: Whats it for?
I feel like they are massacring them, she told me.
The idea of just hunting them for trophies, to take their heads its criminal to me.
Other work recalls Jasper Johns.
Smith had no road map for the kind of career she wanted.
So she charted her own course.
It will sprawl across two floors of the museum and include work made over the past five decades.
The American government doesnt know were here.
The art community has no idea.
I am not one.
I am one among many, she said.
My community comes with me.
This is how its always been since time immemorial.
This is how weve survived.
Jaune was born on the Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana.
Then she realized that art could be more than a momentary escape.
She recognized his determination.
The experience was almost like getting punched in the stomach.
It didnt stop her from pursuing art as a career.
She sold her first work: a pastel piece that she remembers went for about $45.
She chose her gallery, Clarke-Benton in Santa Fe, in part because it represented several New York artists.
That changed for her in November 1979.
And they were always having to move it because the rent would go up.
At her home studio in Corrales, we were surrounded by the evidence of decades of work.
We see the map as a political tool, Smith said.
Its not an empty form to me.
Its not an icon of this incredible country.
She reorients the map by turning it sideways and plasters it with newspaper clippings or images.
The maps message feels less like a public-service announcement than a scab she cant help but pick at.
II(1993), Custer poses defiantly with his back to the trickster of Native American lore.
Jaune found this place, said her son Neal Ambrose-Smith, who is also an artist.
Everything that were doing is in Corrales.
We have our own little village that were able to make art in.
These people are all artists, too, and its important that their work is recognized, Smith said.
Other canoes would be made from different woods and filled with different poisons.
Im using trade canoes to give back stuff thats not good for us, Smith said.
The legacy of Custers war on American Indians seemed to stare back at me from the canoe.
What Memory Map represents is not atonement for that sin but an embrace of sanity.
Smith is one of Americas greatest living artists, and failing to acknowledge that would be madness.
Every piece has an earnest beginning.
It starts with a message, Smith told me.
It starts with something true.
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