This past Memorial Day weekend, I visited the Seattle Art Museum to see the exhibit “American Art: The Stories We Carry.” This is the first major reinstallation of the museum’s American art collection in 15 years.

The exhibition brings the museum’s historical American collection — predominately comprised of works by artists of European descent — into conversation with Native, Asian American, African American, and Latino art, including contemporary art and new acquisitions and commissions.

“The Stories We Carry” is the result of a two-year process and unprecedented collaboration among SAM curators and staff, regional artists and advisers from the Seattle community. Two key goals of the project were to create a new interpretive framework for the American art galleries that bring forward historically excluded narratives and artistic forms and to deepen the museum’s commitment to inclusive exhibition-planning practices.

The project began with the question, “What is American art?” SAM’s American art galleries were last substantially reinstalled in 2007 for the opening of the expanded downtown museum, giving preference to the historical American art canon over the many perspectives that have driven cultural production in North America from the 17th century to World War II, particularly those of artists active in the Pacific Northwest region’s diverse communities.

SAM’s historical American art collection contains approximately 2,500 examples of painting, sculpture, works on paper and decorative arts. It features works by nationally renowned and historically significant artists and Pacific Northwest artists long overdue for closer examination within the American context. The reinstallation emphasizes a more critical and intimate approach to the story of American art, in particular how it intersects with the museum’s Native American art collection, which is presented in adjacent galleries.

Each of the galleries has a theme. The first one that visitors enter, Storied Places, fittingly starts with the land itself, exploring diverse approaches to place, nature and the landscape genre. The next theme, Transnational America, explores how North America became part of a global network of ideas, economies and cultures and unearths the histories embedded in objects of migration, trade, and exploration.

The visitor then explores Ancestors + Descendants, which considers the complexities of portraiture — long a dominant American art form — and reveals the multiplicity of American identities. Then the next gallery, Memory Keepers, reflects on different cultural approaches to storytelling, remembering and legacies, with a special focus on the Pacific Northwest region.

In the midst of these galleries is a room with the theme “Reaching Back, Guiding the Future.” Here, three artworks come together in a dramatic challenge to the legacy of structural racism and colonialism in the U.S.

The center of this room is Nicholas Galanin’s commission for SAM, Neon American Anthem (2023), which fills the gallery with white light from a custom neon installation that offers a proclamation and an invitation: “I’ve composed a new American national anthem: Take a knee and scream until you can’t breathe.” Galanin envisions the work as a participatory performance piece that engages museum visitors to ring out with sounds of protest, mourning or celebration.

What I also found in one of the museum’s galleries, dedicated to modern American art, was the narrative series “The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture” by Jacob Lawrence. This collection was featured in an exhibit recently at Larson Gallery in Yakima.

Opened in October 2022, “American Art: The Stories We Carry” will continue with rotating exhibits.

The best way to measure the impact of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940; citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) is not narrowly through her historic retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the first such presentation for an Indigenous artist organized by the nation’s premier museum dedicated exclusively to American art.

She’s bigger than that.

A sense of her impact can only be adequately appreciated by widening out.

Widening out to Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) at the Columbus Museum of Art. Exhibitions of contemporary Indigenous photography at the Milwaukee Art Museum and the Denver Art Museum. The first presentation of contemporary artwork from Seminole Indians in a Florida art museum. The Counterpublic triennial in St. Louis prominently featuring Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota). Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw-Cherokee) at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville.

A small sampling of the prestigious exhibitions of Native American art on view this spring around the country.

Smith influenced each of these artists, directly or indirectly emboldening each of them and 1,000 more to share unapologetic, contemporary, sometimes confrontational stories of indigeneity. She influenced each of these institutions and hundreds more, blazing a trail into their revered spaces, her artwork clearing a path for others to follow.

She has both made the way and shown the way, embodying the spirit of lifting as she climbs.

“I feel like somebody has to do it,” Smith told Forbes.com. “It might as well be me since my years of experience make me a good candidate, but I bring my community with me anywhere I go.”

Her impact takes especially dramatic form four miles from the Whitney in Brooklyn Bridge Park where Nicholas Galanin’s (Lingít and Unangax̂) 30-foot-tall In every language there is Land / En cada lengua hay una Tierra sculpture boldly affirms that we are on native land. All of us.

None of this happens without Smith who it would be impossible to argue is not the GOAT of contemporary Native American art–the greatest of all time. At least for influence.

She didn’t do this by herself.

Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa) and other Indigenous potters demonstrated more than a century ago that the artistry and skill of Native American material culture was on a level with anything else on view in a fine arts museum. They cracked the museum door.

Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) and T.C. Cannon (Kiowa, Caddo) proved Native people could do the same with so-called “fine art.” Their paintings and Allan Houser’s (Chiricahua Apache) sculpture pushed Native art metaphorically into the lobby.

Over her 50-year career, Smith has made it all the way inside, generations of Native artists following in her wake, taking up residence in art museums across America–the good ones anyway. Not so long ago–in this century–Indigenous art got the side eye when on display in these hallowed halls. Now such spaces get the side eye when failing to display it, anymore, an inexcusable omission.

“(This exhibition) cannot signify a benchmark for a whole race of people,” Smith said. “It can signify to an individual Native artist that perhaps that buckskin ceiling has been broken and possibly more Native artists might follow.”

They are.

Cara Romero (Chemehuevi). Marie Watt (Seneca). Doug Hyde (Nez Perce, Assiniboine, and Chippewa). Emmi Whitehorse (Diné). Julie Buffalohead (Ponca). Edgar Heap of Birds (Cheyenne). Rose Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo). Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo). Yatika Starr Fields (Cherokee, Creek, Osage).

A dozen more.

And a dozen more.

That’s Smith’s impact.

Finally

This journey has been excruciatingly slow going.

Unbelievably, Smith became the first Native American artist to have a painting acquired by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2020. 2020! As in three years ago 2020.

The National Gallery of Art for the United States of America did not deign to acquire a piece of Native American painting until 2020. The museum was established in 1937.

That’s not progress, that’s an outrage. An utter dereliction of duty.

“If we honor our ethnic groups such as Asian Americans, African Americans, Latinx Americans and leave out Native Americans, then we are missing a quarter of our American culture, a quarter of our knowledge base and a major part of our American history,” Smith reminds. “This is significant ignorance.”

That ignorance has been purposeful.

Native art and artists are everywhere and have been everywhere as long as these institutions have been open. Native art doesn’t fill these spaces because of scarcity or lack of quality, it doesn’t fill these spaces because the curators, directors and collectors who make those decisions deemed it unworthy. By extension, they deemed Native people unworthy.

Smith cites the murder of George Floyd by police, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the water protectors at Standing Rock staring down militarized private and government mercenaries as calling attention to the galling lack of minority and Native American representation in “mainstream” museums. Make no mistake, historically and today, these artists have had to force their way into these spaces.

The Whitney’s invitation to Smith, late arriving as it was, remains atypical.

But that’s changing, and it’s changing because of Smith.

“We need to not let up the pressure in order to decolonize the major institutions throughout the U.S.,” Smith said. “Just because these institutions may not exist next to a reservation doesn’t mean there are not Natives there—we are everywhere, so my advice is to be aware.”

Smith’s other advice, her hope for the nation’s culture-bearers, is to hire Native people across the museum. It’s no longer enough to show Native American artwork. Native Americans must be hired as curators–as docents–they must sit on boards and be hired in directorial positions. They must be hired as lawyers and contractors and accountants and art handlers and conservators and chefs in the café and in every other role museums require.

Memory Map

“Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” opened at the Whitney on April 19^th as the most significant solo exhibition for a Native American artist ever. The prestige of the museum, the scale of the show–the largest and most comprehensive of her career displaying more than 130 works across two floors–its location in New York, all are unrivaled in stature.

She more than just takes up space there, she owns it.

Smith has been creating complex abstract and representational paintings, prints, sculptures and installations since the 1970s. Some of her earliest work, rarely seen in public, is on view.

Her distinct visual language combines appropriated imagery from commercial slogans and signage, art history–Picasso, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg–and personal narratives. Maps figure prominently; maps of America. They are perhaps her most iconic device. If not maps, then canoes–trade canoes full of objects she’d like to send back to the colonizers: Christianity, syringes, trash, single use plastic. She uses text, George Armstrong Custer and the buffalo, rabbit and coyote deeply symbolic to many Native American cultures.

All are employed, along with heavy doses of humor and satire, to convey her insistent socio-political commentary with powerful clarity.

“The big get is to show people that we exist, that we are still here, that we have not vanished as we invade white institutions,” Smith said.

Native people exist and are contemporary. If visitors to “Memory Map” or any other exhibition of contemporary Native American art take something from the show, let it be that.

In conclusion of her email interview with Forbes.com, she shared a poem she had recently written entitled, “A Short History of America:”

Snow White came from Europa

She kissed the Frog

Who turned into

A Ledger Book Prince

She converted corn

Into Fritos

And soon

She put everything

Up for sale.

“Memory Map” will be on view at the Whitney through August 13, 2023, before traveling to the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth later this year.

Charleston’s thriving cultural milieu stems in part from the thousands of West and Central Africans brought to the coastal Carolinas to work on cotton, rice, and indigo plantations. Because these regions were so remote (some included barrier islands), descendants of enslaved residents were able to retain certain elements of their Indigenous African culture.

Out of this, a new language, Gullah, was born, along with new artistic traditions that blended traditional and American elements. Today, Charleston has many artists in residence who aim to keep Gullah history alive.

Chanteuse Quiana Parler

One of the most renowned artists in the Lowcountry, Quiana Parler began her professional singing career at The Carolina Opry, a musical variety show in Myrtle Beach. Since landing in the top 48 of season two of American Idol in 2003, she’s performed all over the world and shared the stage with the likes of Clay Aiken, Kelly Clarkson, Ruben Studdard, Bobby McFerrin, Miranda Lambert, and Maroon 5.

Parler currently tours with Charleston’s two-time Grammy-winning jazz ensemble Ranky Tanky—named for a Gullah expression that means “work it” or “get funky”—as the lead female vocalist, and as a lyricist and composer. Along with drummer Quentin Baxter, trumpet player Charlton Singleton, guitarist Clay Ross, and bassist Kevin Hamilton, she serves up contemporary arrangements of old Gullah songs, which were historically performed using only a cappella voices and body percussion, as well as original compositions.

Fifth generation basket weaver Corey Alston

Basket weaving is a cornerstone of West African culture that traces more than three centuries back. In South Carolina, sweetgrass—a supple, perennial grass native to the Lowcountry islands—along with bulrush, pine needle, and palmetto leaves, was used by enslaved people to create baskets used in rice cultivation on the Sea Islands.

A fifth-generation artisan, Corey Alston’s family has been weaving traditional sweetgrass baskets for nearly 100 years. Like his Gullah ancestors, he harvests his own materials from the local landscape, uses no synthetics or machines, and keeps the art form alive by passing down his knowledge to his children. In 2022, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. commissioned a custom sweetgrass basket from Alston that took four months to complete. Charleston visitors can find his works at City Market.

Musical alchemist Charlton Singleton

Charlton Singleton is one of those people who was seemingly born to be a musician. Raised just outside of Charleston in Awendaw, South Carolina, he began his musical studies at age three with the piano. The son of a preacher, he made his stage debut just one year later when he performed Amazing Grace at church.

Singleton went on to embark on what would be a distinguished career as an in-demand performer, composer, arranger, and speaker—what Charleston Magazine sums up as “a musical alchemist, a magician.” He’s taught music at the elementary, middle, and high school levels, served as adjunct faculty member at the College of Charleston, and cofounded the Charleston Jazz Orchestra and Ranky Tanky, for which he won a Grammy Award for the jazz- and Gullah-inspired album Good Time in 2019.

In 2021 this accomplished artist received the Governor’s Award, the highest honor for the arts in the state of South Carolina. Singleton currently serves as Artistic Director for the Charleston Jazz Orchestra, a nonprofit dedicated to performance, education, and outreach in celebration of the city’s jazz history.