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Vanishing Americans
John Haberin New York City
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and Grounded in Clay
I had heard about the vanishing white American, from Trump supporters who take it as a personal threat, and here he is at last. He claims space not in a red state, but at the Whitney.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith painted him in a resonant white—in a canvas, like America itself, divided right down the middle. Two years later, she painted The Vanishing American as well, with equally elusive white faces above a grid of red, black, and earth tones. Patches of fabric hint at other presences as well. Newsprint supplies a cryptic crossword, but nothing is as cryptic as the puzzle of who will inherit a nation. Her vanishing Americans, red and white, are only snowmen. Now if only Americans had respect for each other, the planet, and art, they might have a fair chance to survive. 
How do you cover a thousand years of art in two small rooms? You proceed as if nothing has ever changed, in a Native American tradition that extends to this day. For "Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery" at the Met, a millennium is a single collective moment. It is curated by collective, too—the Pueblo Pottery Collective of artists, poets, and scholars. Nearly sixty members select a work apiece and, in wall text, relate it to what they love. The result is gorgeous and, of course, grounded, but not much in the way of history.
America in red and white
Smith painted The Vanishing White Man in 1992, well before MAGA and melting ice made headlines. She truly is quick to see, and Native Americans, she would like to think, have seen it all. She grew up in Montana, in the Salish and Kootenai nation, and the Pacific Northwest, before settling in New Mexico—with an extended trip northeast to see the effects of acid rain and climate change for herself. Not that this is a major work, but it says a lot about her even now at age eighty-three. I had come expecting a rehash of Native American history, not long after Kent Monkman in the Met lobby and Jimmie Durham at the Whitney itself. Instead, she keeps redefining history as central to American art.
She has her indigenous imagery, like horses on the Great Plains and, a title has it, Women Who Run with the Wolves. She herself had a horse named Cheyenne. Unstretched canvas recalls bison hides, but also women's craft in clothing. Canoes, as with Beau Dick, are a reminder of a native people's "water memories." Yet her imagery belongs to all Americans, and it seems to vanish before one's eyes. It leaves something close to abstraction.
Assemblage, too, may accord with craft traditions, but not only that, not after Robert Rauschenberg. Her loose canvas could cover Rauschenberg's stuffed goat. The curators, Laura Phipps with Caitlin Chaisson, compare her to Marisol in hacked wood and Edward Kienholz with his sinister but clunky assemblage. More often, though, Smith's collage sticks to two dimensions, like the newsprint of The Vanishing American. More often, too, it lies over brushwork right out of postwar American art. The curators speak, too, of her affinities with Neo-Expressionism from the very same years, but once again she goes further back.
Expecting folk art and nothing but folk art? Smith counts, no doubt, as an outsider artist, but she refuses to see her heritage as primitive. The Vanishing White Man has its nearly transparent whites, not far from Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. Its companion painting has its bare canvas and sharp, rough squares of red and black. Its edgy drawing contains the mark of her brush, pencil, and pen. It also plays against the grid.
This is still political art, however abstract. She shares a floor of the museum with Josh Kline, whose video also puts climate change front and center. Still, she goes easy on the lectures. On paper, she does get around to General Custer and to the Lone Ranger and Tonto, but sarcasm does not come naturally to her. They look obvious and nothing more. She is at her best when she lets the story unfold on its own, in paint.
She also keeps her sense of humor. The three circles apiece of her snowmen would earn a smile even without the contrast to their looser, more sophisticated backdrop. More collage in The Vanishing American adds "best if used by 2000," but its date is already past. Smith has the kind of humor that trades on two sides to every story without abandoning a sense of right and wrong. Like the snowmen, this is America in red and white. Tease out what that means and you have the arc of her career.
Mapping out a future
Smith did not start out like a born painter. Her first canvases come right off the wall—those robes or hides, rich in charcoal and beeswax, propped up with a "lodgepole" used by people of the Plains to build a home. Her canoe paintings are shaped canvas as well. Earlier still she sets out an ordinary seated woman in an ordinary chair, shrouded in burlap, as Indian Madonna Enthroned. Already she works across cultures, native and Christian, with a sly humor. What Madonna would be reading God Is Red, without nursing or grieving?
Already, her politics cuts both ways. A canoe recalls a time when her people could call American waters their own, but these are "trade canoes"—from trade in tribal resources that favored whites. Soon, too, she sets her painted canoe beneath a row of found objects, including baseball caps and plastic shopping baskets. Trade takes two parties, and its commodities do not always benefit either side. Later a canoe fully enters three dimensions, in red plastic. So much for Native American.
If Smith had a breakthrough, it came when she traded the materiality of assemblage for the materiality of acrylic and oil. Series from the 1980s focus in turn on the Cheyenne, Chief Seattle (or simply C.S.), and Petroglyph Park. That last reflects her dawning sense of losing the earth, as development threatens rockfaces on native grounds. Seen up close, the cliffs taught her to value flatness and the grid. Those years also brought her first outpourings of color and tumbling forms. She could be recapitulating Wassily Kandinsky, who also had an eye for horses.
These are emblems of a nation, but which nation? An American flag covers her Madonna's lap as well. Is it confining or reassuring? The flag returns often in later paintings, as do maps of the United States, bearing the names of states, tribes, or (with McFlag) brand logos. Which defines the limits of these united states? This is Pop Art with a vengeance.
Maps and flags have an obvious precursor in Jasper Johns, and the entire show could be a response to Johns in retrospective in this very museum and in the nation's birthplace, Philadelphia. Again, though, this is not all irony. Smith does not give the flag tribal colors, like David Hammons with the colors of Pan-African unity, or a ghostly negative. She embraces it. Surely she had seen Johns in encaustic when she adopted beeswax. These are layers and layers of Pop Art as well.
The 1990s brought the five hundredth anniversary of 1492 and her vision of a "post-Columbian world"—part of a growing optimism that does not always suit her. Her expressionism runs more to stick figures and angular faces in black, like those of Jean-Michel Basquiat, and images refer to tribal medicine. Still, she is not just looking back, before white America, or looking away. As text on one painting proclaims, "all breathe the same air." Another favorite image, a coyote, enters folklore as a trickster, but who is fooling whom? She may not be around long enough to say.
On shifting ground
For the collective, pottery sustains a people and a tradition. It has its uses, for cooking and storage, but also its spiritual and artistic value. The show divides into four sections for utility, ancestors, elements, and connections through time and space, but do not dream of keeping them apart. One curator introduces Anthony Durand, a much admired potter with a bold, distinctive style, by quoting his grandmother, who "taught me that our pottery is made for functional use." Even a puki, or potter's wheel clotted with red clay, could also carry water. For his own jar, Durand thoughtfully supplies a lid.
In turn, for all those hundreds of years, pottery displays much the same patterns of broken parallels, spotted here and there with animal life. It is making and remaking a people and their beliefs. Last, it has room for an individual's contributions, like Durand's broad horizontals in black and gold. If one had any doubt that a work could do three or four things at once, those "elements" are the earth and water of moist clay, the fire that makes it pottery, and the air of a potter's inspiration. Can it still, though, speak of a single community and an unbroken tradition? A year after indigenous "Water Memories," also in the Met's American wing, and Civil War–era black potters in the Lehman wing, I have my doubts.
The show has its ground zero in the southern half of New Mexico, but crosses borders in every direction. As for chronology, forget about it. The curators pick their favorites, but the work falls where it may. History itself gets a pass, including the brutal history of Indian wars and white displacement. For that, you will just have to begin in the present, with Smith at the Whitney. What so much as distinguishes the Pueblo? Even there, you are pretty much on your own.
The curators, with scholarly support from the Indian Arts Research Center of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and the Vilcek Foundation, supply a map. They also list nearly two dozen tribes, in both their own language and common usage. Plainly this is contested ground. Yet they stick to an upbeat narrative with a happy ending, like so much attention to diversity today. For more, one can always continue into the Diker collection, on long-term view, including pottery amid the decorative arts, often from much the very same place. You may hardly notice where either show begins or ends.
For all that, the Met does a service by introducing recent artists in context. Monica Silva, Rachel Namingha Nampeyo, Juanita Johnson, and Emilia (Emily) Lente Carpio use gentler curves like waves, for a time more concerned with a people's place in nature. I might even guess at an evolution in time—but bear in mind that early work, after a thousand years of wear and tear, may not be as crude as it looks. Around the first European contact, glazed jars become smoother and more deeply glazed, with all the polish of colonial art. The most recent artists grow more personal. They may all but eliminate the bowl in favor of abstraction from nature, like black turtle figurines by Greg Garcia and a corrugated bowl in deep red by Helen Naranjo Shupla.
They may become more self-conscious, like Jeralyn Lujan Lucero with a seated woman beside her own tiny bowl. They may become downright whimsical as well, like a face jug by Lorencita Pino and a figurine by Felipa Trujillo, although a free-standing figure by an unknown artist dates as early as 1900. It makes sense that the curators keep citing their grandmothers, as artists and judges of art. It is not just that they set a model for working away, as women. They are also close enough to the present to belong to the curator's experience, but far enough the past to harbor memories of their own. A loose sense of time is simultaneously a tradition.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith ran at The Whitney Museum of American Art through August 13, 2023, "Grounded in Clay" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art through June 4, 2024.