Despite her upset battle at any time, Jaune quickly saw Smith being motivated and motivated to work tirelessly to get her voice heard with other Indigenous female artists. Jaune is a great teacher who encourages anyone who struggles in the art world. She actively seeks out the Aboriginal artists of the performances she curates and hires young writers to help with the many catalogs and books she compiles. She has been moving, giving speeches, attending conferences and networking. She will take a day trip from New Mexico to New York, see museum performances and visit galleries, and then fly back to the charming place on Red Eye!
Jaune’s art reflects the same energy. The good and bad information flowed out of her as quickly as possible. When the paint drips off the canvas, she uses a collage to apply it on it and then paint it completely in the moment and then lay it a layer. When her work is always in conversation with the old and new art, she strongly believes that her creative process is connected to her traditional tribal approach, including preparation, tanning and dying skin. Jaune’s imprints are made with contemporary eyes, but are informed by the land she grew up with utilitarian objects created and collected by her father, such as Lariat Braids and the traditional beads he wore.
Despite her intensity and motivation, Jaune always incorporates humor into her passion for historical truths and pursues endless omissions and blatant oversight of Native American views in contemporary art. Jaune’s perseverance pays off and we all thank her for her broad mind focused on a European-centered approach to art history.
When I recall Jaune’s influence on me in the early days, an episode of a conservative arts professor we shared at the University of New Mexico stands out. Jaune felt the pressure to produce a beautiful canvas to impress our teacher, and Jaune took a roll of raw canvas, cut it into the shape of animal skins, and threw it into the washing machine with RIT clothing dye. After the twisted canvas dried into wrinkled chaos, she continued to hang it on top of two wooden poles she found in the hardware store. Her confidence in introducing such a work (which broke all the norms and expectations of the time) was one of the things I admired most about Jaune, which gave me the courage to defend my original ideas and confident that I was standing on solid ground.
Jaune’s confidence in her work expanded to her ability to insert herself into the feminist art world of the 1980s. At the time, Miriam Schapiro and Harmony Hammond introduced her current artistic trends, from “women’s works” such as crochet, embroidery and needlework to large-scale “male” sculptures like Jackie Winsor. Both Jaune and I attended Peter Jemison of the American Indian Community Home in New York, which helped us negotiate the art world and gained some exposure. My eyes widened as an 18-year-old boy wandered with Jaune and she introduced me to a series of pioneering artists and their ideas.
Jaune and I got together at a lucky moment, seemingly meeting and sharing a lifelong friendship. At the beginning, when I arrived at college directly from high school, I was only 17 years old and must have tested her patience at times. But she was always by my side.
In the decades we’ve been friends, Jaune’s activism and comrades helped me hone my horizons and make a large swath of water in my art look like a lot of water. I stayed in the course of my choice, expanding my vision in every painting I made, so I owe Jaune and all the wisdom and support she showed me, as well as many other artists of the time.
