The Brooklyn Rail

Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always is on view at the Zimmerli Art Museum at Rutgers University, New Brunswick Campus, through December 21, 2025.¹ It is both the largest and the last exhibition of work by Native artists that was organized by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (b. 1940, Flathead Reservation, Montana; d. 2025, Corrales, New Mexico).² The show includes more than one hundred works by ninety seven artists, representing some seventy Nations and communities. Many of the creators find their roots in more than one Nation group.

Adjacent to Indigenous Identities, there is a gallery featuring Quick-to-See Smith’s own works, primarily prints, that includes four related lithographs from the series “Survival Suite” (all 1996). Each lithograph has an individual title identifying its essential subject: Wisdom/Knowledge, Tribe/Community, Nature/Medicine, and Humor. The text for this gallery quotes Quick-to-See Smith: “I am telling stories about hope with humor. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t have hope.”

As a group, the four works of “Survival Suite” bring together much that is fundamental to the life and art of Quick-to-See Smith, as well as the Native art included in the exhibition, which is likewise organized around four section titles: “Political,” “Tribal,” “Social,” and “Land.” That said, many of the multilayered works on view could readily be included in a category other than the one in which they currently reside.

The exhibition is intergenerational, including artists currently in their eighties as well as those born at the end of the twentieth century. Most of the art, however, dates to the twenty-first century. The kinds of objects and the methods and materials used to form them are vast. It is untenable to categorize them either as usable (most often referred to in the category of “craft”) or non-usable (generally assigned to the “fine arts,” although this designation has historically been limited by material used in their making, with objects of fiber and clay often the trickiest to place).

In the context of Indigenous artists’ work, the spiritual impact of objects generally overpowers all else, authorizing the works to be honored for this reason, as well as for the relationships of contemporary methods to those used by the creators’ foremothers and forefathers, on whose shoulders they stand. This idea is evident throughout the exhibition, highlighting the centrality of the “Here, Now & Always” invoked by the title, taking us both backward and forward. The world of the cosmic is set in thought-provoking motion in many of the works on view as well, such as Frank Big Bear’s majestic Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery (2022), worked in colored pencil on six sheets of black illustration board. This complex, meticulously rendered community dance sets in motion the lyricism that is prevalent throughout the exhibition. It is one of several compositions that are worked in multiple sections, a choice made not necessarily because of their grand size, but perhaps to emphasize the fragmentation that tyranny has brought to Native peoples. It may also signify the multidimensionality of Native world-views as they move across time and space. Also on six sheets of paper is First Generation (2016), by Andrea Carlson, which employs oil, acrylic, ink, colored pencil, and graphite.

Seasonal weather and times of day, as they change and cycle across time, are often evoked, as in Duane Slick’s mysterious acrylic on linen, There Are No Endings (2018), and Star WallowingBull’s Arapaho Man with Traditional Design (2004), which is installed adjacent to Ghost Dance of the Great Mystery, enabling comparison of these two very different works in colored pencil. What struck me in both is that their immense skillfulness is not the first thing that is apparent. Rather, the layered ideological complexity of the subjects and compositions calls for more immediate attention, thus enabling a richer visual experience.

Late in her life Quick-to-See Smith wrote to me about the importance to her of her beloved relations, including the grizzlies, coyotes, magpies, bitterroot plants, and her ancestors from the past eighty-thousand years. Her inclusive and interconnected world reflects the generosity evident in the Indigenous Identities exhibition, as in all her previous gatherings of Native artists (programmatic as well as curatorial). Critters in this exhibition include bison, buffalo, horses, fish, and birds—and multiple references to nature’s changing bounty of growing things are on display as well.

Quick-to-See Smith’s desire to have Native artists meet and interact with each other has been an essential part of the artist, curator, and teacher’s agenda since she was a graduate student. Likewise, she was eager for the wider community to acknowledge the rich visual, cultural, and intellectual world available by encountering this legacy. Among the impressive works on view is Sarah Sense’s Dickens (2022), constructed of woven archival inkjet prints on bamboo Hahnemuhle paper and tape, which sends a visitor back to reexamine the many other woven works on view. Its reference to one of the great figures in nineteenth century English literature parallels Kelly Caroline Frye’s Malevich Pueblo-Style #4 (2023), an homage to Russian artist Kazimir Malevich (1878–1935). Together these two works testify to a rich overlapping of diverse traditions that is often reflected in a serial approach, and is also suggested by other works and titles throughout this show.

There is a great diversity of work included here, too much to do justice to in this reflection. I have made no mention, for example, of the modern as opposed to traditional materials that are embraced, such as Neal Ambrose-Smith’s use of neon for Abstract in Your Home (2009), or the time-based portion of the exhibition, which includes moving images that likewise reflect the specificity of Native artists at work. The labels, which include many statements by the artists, are both instructive and fascinating as well—one visit is hardly enough to fully engage Indigenous Identities: Here, Now & Always.