Artists honored during National Women’s History Month

To honor the originality, beauty, imagination, and multiple dimensions of women’s lives, the National Women’s History Project has chosen “Women’s Art: Women’s Vision” as the 2008 theme for National Women’s History Month in March.

To ensure that a diversity of art and artists are represented, the 2008 honorees were selected based on their art, their vision, their art form, their cultural background, the region in which they live, and the quality and passion of the nomination submitted.

NWHP Director Molly Murphy MacGregor said three of this year’s honorees have ties to New Mexico: Judy Chicago, a painter, printmaker and tapestry and needlework artist; Harmony Hammond, a painter; and Jaune Quick-To-See Smith, a painter and printmaker.

Spotlight this week on:

Jaune Quick-To-See Smith

Smith was born in 1940 at the Indian Mission on the Flathead Reservation in 1940. She is an enrolled Flathead Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Indian Nation, Mont.

She received an Associate of Arts degree at Olympic College in Bremerton, Wash., in 1960. She attended the University of Washington in Seattle, received her BA in Art Education at Framingham State College in 1976, and a masters’ degree in art at the University of New Mexico in 1980.

Smith is one of today’s most acclaimed American Indian artists. She has been reviewed in all major art periodicals. She has had more than 100 solo exhibits in the past 35 years and has done printmaking projects nationwide. During that same time, she has organized and/or curated more than 30 Native American exhibitions, lectured at more than 185 universities, museums and conferences internationally, most recently at five universities in China.

Smith has received numerous awards recognizing her artistic achievements, such as the Governor’s Outstanding New Mexico Woman’s Award 2005 and the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Her art is displayed in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Quito, Ecuador; the Museum of Mankind, Vienna, Austria; The Walker, Minneapolis, Minn.; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan and The Whitney Museum, N.Y.

The 27th Medical Group at Cannon AFB is hosting Women’s History Month for March and provided the above information from the National Women’s History Project at
www.nwhp.org