Jaune Quick-to-See Smith doesn’t drop hints or murmur suggestions in her massive two-storey retrospective at the Whitney in New York: she wallops viewers with poetic fury, pummels with politics and swings a hammer of outrage. A citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation (which is based in Montana), Smith forges her paintings, collages, drawings and sculptures out of Indigenous themes, fused with the legacies of art history’s white men: Paul Klee, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. The result is work that’s lively enough to seduce the eye and sturdy enough to carry a load of environmentalist and anti-capitalist convictions. Subtle, it’s not.

Effective political art often has little use for nuance, and Smith brings up ecological disaster and genocide with single-minded gusto. Salish motifs, such as canoes, buffalo and various traditional garments, act as bait for wordy polemics. “The icon is a ploy in order to pull a viewer into closer range where the brrump-pah-pah happens,” she’s said. “What you see is not what you get.”

In one 12-foot-long collage, the outline of a canoe plies a river of newspaper clippings, flyers and posters. The topic is logging and the disruption of what one sign describes as “the country’s biggest wildlife refuge and calving ground for 150,000 migrating caribou”. An antlered herd marches across the upper part of the frame.

The artist was born in 1940 on the Flathead Reservation in Montana and had a rough childhood. Her mother gave birth at 14 and abandoned the family when Smith was still a little girl. Her father, a much older itinerant horse trader, forced her to work — and to hide her passion for reading by climbing a tree. “If somebody caught me with ‘my nose in a book’, it was a bad thing,” she has said.

She faced constant discouragement: “Indians don’t go to college,” a high-school counsellor informed her. “Women cannot be artists,” a teacher at Olympic College pronounced, even as he acknowledged that she was better than any of the men. Later, she was advised not to apply to the master of fine arts programme at the University of New Mexico. “They said, ‘Indians go to art ed, you can’t do fine art because Indians do crafts.’” She ignored all that advice.

She did, however, take her cues from a different kind of elder: Klee. In a series of semi-abstract landscapes from the late 1970s, rendered in pastel and pencil on paper, she evokes entire landscapes in a few spare strokes of line and dabs of colour. Arrows suggest movement. A dotted path leads through triangles that resemble both tepees and mountains. A tangle of lines resolves into a horse, and a tree emerges out of smudges of green and orange.

Smith renders animals, plants, architecture and topography in a set of idiosyncratic symbols that read as simultaneously personal and universal. The Whitney owns three of these luminous works, which weave together modernist techniques, indigenous traditions, maps and ancient petroglyphs.

Unfortunately, the current exhibition is too vast to pick out the greatest hits of the ensuing five decades. Instead, its inclusiveness accentuates the repetitive habits of a long career, during which subtlety gave way to proclamation.

Somewhere along the way, she drifted from Klee’s sphere of influence into Rauschenberg’s and Johns’. At first glance (and maybe even at second), her penchant for newsprint collages, flags and maps makes her work look derivative. But there’s a fine, almost undetectable line between copying and critique, an ambiguity that curator Laura Phipps and several catalogue essayists play up.

“Sovereign Nations” (2002) epitomises her approach. She layers three women’s cut-wing dresses, on top of another, in ever-smaller versions, suggesting sequential generations of women. Each is decorated in a pattern of stars, and the composition recalls Johns’ “Three Flags” (1958) hanging two floors up in the Whitney’s permanent collection. Johns’ intentions remain elusive: did he use the flag patriotically or ironically, as a wry comment on jingoistic imperialism or a full-throated embrace of his country’s freedoms? Ambivalence is the point.

Smith, on the other hand, leaves no doubt about her agenda. She encircles the dresses with collaged copies of the 1855 Treaty of Hellgate, which the US government signed, ratified and repeatedly violated. The seal of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes hangs like a breastplate on the child-sized topmost garment, a reference to the leadership of Native women.

If Smith turned to Johns for help in making her points, it’s because she admired his knack for speaking to a broad audience through a Pop vernacular. The process of retooling his style into a vehicle for her own ideas constitutes a “direct postmodern appropriation and ironic repurposing of his subject matter”, writes the art historian Richard Hill. In Smith’s art, he adds, “we are directly challenged to read the signifiers from an Indigenous perspective.” In other words, don’t bother trying to interpret her meaning because she’ll just tell you what it is.

It would be hard to miss the message of “The Speaker” (2015). A woman in a leotard and a feline mask stands on a mountain peak, large feet planted on the animate rock. She brandishes a cruciform stick of the kind, Smith says, that women use to dig bitterroot and which doubles as a sceptre of power. Language pours from the woman’s mouth in the form of a snake, like a word bubble in a comic book. The serpent represents the courage to sound off, the ferocity that an Indigenous woman artist needs to declare her presence in an unfriendly world.

The symmetry, symbolic language and the figure’s pose, parting waves of colour, all imply a one-to-one relationship between gesture and belief. In the end, the exhibition’s doggedly instructional pile-up comes to feel heavy-handed and tiresome rather than urgent. It makes me wish she would insist a little less on the brrump-pah-pah.

To August 13, whitney.org

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