Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith

Blackwater Draw II

Blackwater Draw II by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes) is an artistic reimagination of a historically significant location. Blackwater Draw, in what is now known as New Mexico, features artifacts from the Clovis culture. Limited information exists about Clovis culture, which dates back to approximately 11,000 B.C. Through abstract brushstrokes and layered fabrics, Smith’s imagination fills in the gaps of the unknown, visualizing the site as, in her words, a “canyon-like place” with “narrow channels of water.” Blackwater Draw II belongs to a series of paintings that Smith made in the early 1980s about real or imagined archaeological sites. Of her Site Paintings, she has remarked, “these aren’t realistic paintings of sites, but the essence of my feeling about the site.” She insists that her landscapes are living, rather than relics of the past. Unlike American landscape paintings, which are largely uninhabited and highly romanticized, Smith’s compositions of land convey a liveliness, animated by horses.