(light piano music)
- [Beth] We're here in the Smithsonian American Art Museum
looking at a painting by Jaune Quick-To-See Smith
called "State Names."
And you immediately recognize
the outline of the United States,
but at the same time that map is obscured
and made difficult to read.
So it's at once recognizable and not recognizable.
- [Anne] Something that Smith does in her work
is she works with these icons,
these images that are instantly recognizable.
But what she does with them is then she adds a twist.
And so she describes her use of icons as a ploy,
as something that brings the viewer closer
and they think they know what they're going to see.
And then, once they're there, something else happens.
- [Beth] There are a lot of state names
that are indicated here in this type
that's large and feels very educational.
But some are clearly missing.
- [Anne] Some of the names that are present are obscured.
And then some of the names
of the states are miss altogether.
And so one of the questions that often comes up fairly soon
after you start to engage with this work
is, why do we see the names of some states
but not other states?
"State Names" is a work about the etymology
of the names of U.S. states.
So the states that are remaining in the work,
these are the names of states
that come from indigenous sources.
The states that have been removed,
those are names that have European origins.
- [Beth] The outlines of the states are largely obscured.
- [Anne] Names are missing,
boundaries are obscured, there's dripping paint.
You get a sense that what we're looking at
is a contested space in a lot of ways.
And so when you see the dripping paint,
what does that evoke?
Is it blood?
Is it tears?
Is something melting?
- [Beth] And we're reminded that these state boundaries
are not ones that were at all relevant
to Native American peoples.
- [Anne] It does reinforce how arbitrary
those boundaries are.
Smith has said that her maps are points of departure
for the political treatment of Native people.
And she's also said that she cannot say strongly enough
that her maps are about stolen lands.
- [Beth] When I think about the map of the United States,
I tend to read it the way I learned it
in elementary school, from right to left.
From the settling of the Eastern Seaboard
to thirteen colonies and then westward expansion.
So I'm immediately part of a historical narrative
that looks back to Manifest Destiny.
- [Anne] Even the term westward expansion
is asserting a particular point of view.
Is it westward expansion, or is it eastern invasion?
Smith has said that she likes to use maps
because maps can tell stories.
So what stories are being told?
Who's telling the stories?
She's interested in telling a particular story
from a particular point of view.
So Smith has been a leading contemporary
American artist since the 1970s.
And she works in a variety of media.
Smith is an enrolled member
of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes
of the Flathead Nation.
She began making maps for exhibitions
that were responding to the Columbus Quincentennial in 1992.
- [Beth] So directly related to the beginnings
of European colonization in North America.
- [Anne] Smith was trained as an abstract expressionist.
And we may think of maps and Jasper Johns.
We may think of collage.
Because what she has here are the names of the states,
those are clippings that are then put over the paint,
and the paint is put over the clipping.
So we have these really rich layers in this work.
- [Beth] "State Names" was created in 2000.
So half a century after Pollock and Johns and Rauschenberg,
artists who so evidently had an impact on her work.
But she's drawing on that art historical,
mid-twentieth century tradition
to say something about her own identity
and the identity of her people.
- [Anne] Her work really challenges us
to think about identity in different ways,
about heritage in different ways,
about history in different ways.
- [Beth] I noticed too that we don't just have state names,
we have the names of areas outside
of the boundaries of the United States.
- [Anne] The boundaries between states,
it's a very arbitrary distinction
as is the boundaries between countries here.
And so while the work is called "State Names,"
we have the top of Mexico just below the southern border
of the United States, we have the bottom part of Canada.
- [Beth] It's interesting to me too
how she's chosen to make the oceans black.
That gives it a very ominous feeling to me.
- [Anne] The dripping paint combined with the black oceans
really does contribute to this ominous feel.
Once you look at a work like "State Names,"
you might not think about the name Arizona
or Ohio or Nebraska in the same way
because you're thinking about the history of that name.
When we think about our history in a different way,
it also asks us to think
about our present in a different way.
(light piano music)