Illustrated Daily; 5032; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

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I want them to be spontaneous and intuitive, a little bit off balance. I want them to have very good color from my own interpretation. I want them to be a little rugged or crude. I don't like them to be highly polished or finished. I like some dripping paint, I like some thick paint, I like to see some areas of the canvas. I have this whole shopping list of what I'm looking for and I try to get that in all of the paintings. I want them to make the viewer feel like I just went up there and this just came out of me. It wasn't studied, it's not intellect. I don't want them to be intellectualized. It kills them. Art that is intellectualized dies for me.

I have that horse, crazy over that horse. He just came out of there, this little horse or she. And with these little stick legs and when I was working with the brush like that, here appeared that little horse. I love reading about the steps or genghis Khan or the Mongolians and the little Mongol horses from that area were fierce little horses and carried heavy loads and it's terrible cold up there.

They're fuzzy little animals and built close to the ground and in some ways Cheyenne makes me think of those horses. John, if it were possible for me to interview Cheyenne, which obviously is not, but if it were, what might he tell me about the mind and spirit of Jean Quick to see Smith? Well, don't know what he'd tell about the mind and the spirit. I know that he would say, I'm well fed and I'm loved and I'm cared for and he doesn't like it when I'm gone because there's no one here to pet him and give him snacks. And I think he knows that I'm a kind person and he's old and I think he knows that he's cared about. I guess mind and spirit, I don't think really count that much, but I think horses, I think they have an intuitive feeling for people and they know if people understand them. Because I can walk through the door and he won't nip at me, but if someone comes here and you try to get through the door, he's apt to nip at you. He knows it's okay for me to go through the door.

And so I think they know there are people horses too. All right, Jean Quick to see Smith on Jean Quick to see Smith. You've described yourself as a bridge, as a connector of people. What does that mean? It means that as I travel and I do a lot of traveling and a lot of lecturing, it means that I'm a resourceful person. When I meet someone who appears to me to have a certain kind of information, I will record their name and address and I will keep that and farther down the road, I will find someone else or I already know someone else who needs that information. Maybe something that that person has and often it has to do, of course, with the college at home on my reservation. The fact that they have a very small budget, the fact that their library needs books and the fact that they don't have much of a budget for books means that when I meet people out there and talk to them when I'm lecturing at the end of the lecture I may talk about the college.

Those people in that audience often will come and volunteer to either send clothing or to send books or they may have some other information that they want for me. And so I feel sometimes like an information exchange. It's a free service. And how roads on John Quick to see Smith, I think I see a person with a mind that synthesizes things real quickly, puts them together, very quickly in her mind, and that it comes through not only in her personality but in her art, how far from the Mark Am I? I think maybe not as quickly as you think. I think that sometimes I have to think about it for a while and when I distill it down I think what I have a remarkable ability to do is to distill things and put them into a simple form so that I may not be as fast as the average bear intellectually. But I do have an ability for distilling things and for finding the things that are important to me or that I may be able to use later.

And I think though my name is Quick to see, it doesn't mean Quick to see or Quick to intellect. It's a name that my grandmother had that means insight. And I think I've worked a lot on that because when I go out to lecture I may see people only for a few hours at a time and it means that during that length of time I have to get as much out of it as I possibly can. A lot of that information I carry back here with me to the studio to help me with my work, but a lot of that information that I gather out there will help other Indian people, whether it's other Indian artists or other Indian people that I meet along the way. So I guess in the answer to your question it's probably not all that fast, but it's a way of distilling information. I think that I'm pretty good at that process of distillation. Is that a function of intellect or spirit? A lot of it has to do with intuition, a real gut level intuition. It's like when we talked about Cheyenne, my father called it horse sense. And I like to think that I have common sense, but I also like to think I have horse sense, I think which is intuition.

I think so. If you've been around horses which you have, I think you know that horses are not very bright animals. And I think that in working around horses you know that there's also something about the horse that's very intuitive. And the horse knows when you're frightened or the horse knows when you've lost control and the horses in control. I intuition, I don't know what else to describe it. Sometimes I think that intuition will serve a better purpose, at least it does for me, almost then intellect. How do we get equipped with intuition? You're born with it. You were very fortunate, you were born with a lot of it. Something else you have said I wanted to ask you about. Cultures do not, cultures which do not change, you have said die.

And I'm curious, should I infer from that, that cultural change within the Indian communities and tribes today, does not worry you that much? No, no. When I go home to the reservation and I talk to the kids in the schools on the reservation, the first thing I tell them is that we have to get educated. Above and beyond everything else, we have to get educated. We have to be able to read and write in order to compete in this modern world. And do not be afraid to leave the reservation and go to a college or a university to complete your education. Absolutely utmost that we get this education. And one of the important things that I can back this statement up with is that many Indian people are going home to the reservations after they get their education to work. Used to be that the Bureau of Indian Affairs on my reservation was maybe 90% white people.

Today it's 90% Indian people, Indian people with college educations and degrees. And I see this happening everywhere I go, whether it's on the reservations or to urban centers, where there are lots of collections of Indian people who live for three generations in the urban centers now. So you can't disqualify the urban centers. It's almost like reservations in themselves. Although it's usually Penn, Indian, there are usually multiple tribes within that area. But no, I do really feel that in order to get along in the 20th century, we absolutely have to change. And we have to do it rapidly, but we will not lose our cultures. Our cultures will change. But I think that we will survive as a culture. And I use the Jewish people as a comparison. I was going to ask you, why is it that so many traditional cultures worry about losing their cultural roots when there's so little evidence that that really ever happens, at least entirely? Well, let's think about the Irish people when, oh no, let's go farther back than that. Let's think about the pilgrims when they first came to this country.

And look at all the things that they've set for us. Our puritanical attitudes about sex, about decoration, about art forms, godliness and the workplace. I mean, think about all the things that have set the tone for this country. But yet, we don't all go around wearing pilgrim clothes and speaking in old sort of English. I wonder if we even could if we tried. Tell me about sending money to the famous artist's school. Now, I, true confession, I did that one time. Yes. Thank heavens, nothing came of it. I could have set art back for, you know, decades. You're the only person I met who's admitted it. You see, it's not something that people admit. Really? No.

I know somebody else rather famous. Bill Maldon did. He did? Yes. Well, bless you and bless Bill. I thought I was the only person. And yet, somebody has had to keep that school going as many years as it did. Lots of people have kept that school. Tell me about that. I want to hear about that. Well, it was a dream. I mean, it was a dream since I think I was six years old to be an artist. I didn't know that women should not be artists. I didn't know that there were, there were any rules about who could be an artist in those days. So when I got into high school, I had picked beans for the NEC farmers and harvested raspberries and multiple other things like that in the, in the, in the crops that rotated through the year. And saved part of that money that I didn't need for school to buy the famous artist course. And I bought it. And eventually, I didn't finish that course, but I took it with me and went to a small college in Burlington, Washington to start art in 1958. And it then took me 22 years to get my master's degree in fine art here at the university.

Is there anything from the famous artist school that, that we might find still lurking about in the art of Jean Quick to see Smith? One of my favorite things in that course was drawing a chicken on there. And since it was the commercial art course, it wasn't the creative. They had two courses, one for fine art and one for commercial art because they had those very segmented and often isn't these days. But the chicken, I remember doing the chicken over and over again in there and sending it back and not getting it right. And now the way I do chickens is not the right way. I still do them the way probably I did when I was six. Because I remember a drawing I did with the arms sticking out and I still laugh about that because the arms going like this are like this. And I still like to do that. How important is academic training for an artist? I think it's important, very important.

Why? Regardless of how hackneyed I make my figures and stick figures in the way I do things, which is disgusting to some people because I don't do them the right way. You do them as you did your chicken. With funny legs and funny arms on them. I did learn to draw well, really drafts personally, as much as anybody could draw like a camera would take a picture. And I still can draw it to this day. I have some drawings around and I will occasionally do that for a special project. It was like Picasso who went to school and learned to draw in the best fashion, so wonderfully that his father laid down his brushes and his father said, I will never be the artist you will. And then he said, Picasso says this in some of his writings, that after he learned to draw, then he spent the rest of his life trying to draw like a child. Clay talks about the same things in his diary about going out to watch children draw to the schools or looking at drawings from mental patients, looking at African art in order to destruct what he had spent all those years learning.

And you would say, why would anyone want to do this? Why do you want to destroy what you spent all those years? And if you believe in that kind of education, then why would you turn around and destroy this? And the reason is because something in here, that thing called the mystery, that thing that makes you so unique that when you do your handwriting or sign your name or whatever, that you want this to come out instead. So then you want that intuitive thing to come out. And of course, that's what divides the classicist from the romanticist. I mean, if you think about music, music is divided up the same way. Painting is divided the same way. It could almost divide politics in the same way. You're seducing me into something that you must keep me away from, because I'd like to know how politics divides itself between the classicist and the romanticist.

But I don't want to go too deeply into this, because there's a lot more about art, but you've got to tell me now. Well, my feeling is that it divides the logicians from the humanists. That's my feeling. And I can give you examples of that as far as the painters are concerned. In painters who paint with intellect, with plans, who paint from their art school training, and who follow rules prodigiously when they work, that you use certain claims of brushes. You hold the handle here, not here, close to the head. You hold the handle at the end. I mean, I've had all the art school training with all of the rules that there are there. And then what you do when you're a romanticist, or a humanist, or whatever, you turn your back on that, and you go in the opposite direction. I know you've got to come from here, not here.

I know you have, you are not bereft of political views. Give me a classicist as politician. Give me a humanist or a romanticist as politician. We don't want any names, do we? Sure. Mondell and Reagan. All right. Which is which? Well, Mondell is the humanist. We shouldn't dwell on this. I have a feeling. We shouldn't do this. Well, I'm having a good time, but I don't want to get away from something. You said earlier, and I'm going to talk about what you call your R&D, your research and development. And let me tell you at the outset, I disagree with your feelings that an artist, research and development, as you call it, ought not be accessible to the public. Think about Michelangelo. What if we did not have access to what, in effect, was his R&D?

Well, or Da Vinci. Yes. But Da Vinci, you see, was such a brilliant man. He was a genius. We had very few artists like that. We had very few artists that, you know, are thinkers in many areas. If I had a choice right now of some other things to do, one is I would like to go back to law school. The other thing is I would like a degree in biology. I loved biology, and I love animals, and I love watching the sand hills go over the house here, and sitting outside and watching the chickens. I mean, I would like to be Jane Goodall. If you gave me a half a dozen things that I would like to do right now, I would like to do all of those things. And equally, I think I could almost be a social worker. I think right now I could start a sideline business and be, you know, some kind of an art consultant to the Indian community. I think I have enough wherewithal and enough knowledge can open enough doors that I see all sorts of jobs that need to be done out there, that I can't, that I couldn't do by myself right now. There is a job that you did that I wanted to ask you about, and that's young quick to see Smith, the curator, notably the collection of works of American Indian photographers, the first read of his kind. I gather you took real satisfaction in doing that.

Absolutely, sure. Right. I mean, lots of wonderful things came to me. I mean, not me personally in a way, although they affected me here. First of all, when I travel around and talk to other Indian people and look at things, I had been finding some photographs here and there that I thought were interesting. And so I asked the Indian people that I talked to, had they ever exhibited these photographs? No, they hadn't. They said probably no one would be interested in them anyway. And I had founded the Greg Canyon people here in the mid-70s. And I had talked to them about trying to get some shows out to the reservations because the children out there don't see our work. They don't know who we are and they don't know what we do. And most of them copy out of books, old stylized Indian forms that disappoints me greatly. I want them to make work from their heart. And so I felt that shows going out to the reservations was important.

So I had talked to the Greg Canyon people about maybe if we did photographs, not of our work, but maybe if we just took photographs, we could ship those out. So that was my first idea about the photography. But here I was finding photographers who already were schooled in universities who were photographers and they were making their work. So then I started writing and calling people and saying, do you know any Indian photographers? This was about three years. And I kept getting answers like, no, but I heard of somebody over there who was a journalist, they might have some photographs. That sort of thing. But I kept up with it. And what I did was I uncovered some of my closest friends who were painters or poets or what have you who had been making photographs and collecting them on their own. And who were very versatile in photography, who just had never, never shown them. What did they see? What did they see that a non-Indian photographer might not have seen? First thing is not the stoic Indian. That's the first thing. Not the idea that you get from, and I won't need names, but that you get from other people's photographs in Arizona highways. That sort of thing.

The Indian dressed in full regalia. What you're getting are quiet genre scenes of real people. In real clothing, just like every day America wears. They are not dressed for powwow time. They are not dressed for some ceremony. So that often you would recognize that these are American Indian people. You could say this person could be Filipino, Eurasian, et cetera, which often we get called when we're out on the streets someplace. If someone asks what we are, that they wonder what race we are. And they don't recognize American Indians unless you are loaded down in ribbons and beadware. So that's why in this country we're invisible people. So I thought, well, I think it's time that people see American Indians as they really live their lives every day with a lunchpale or a school child getting ready for school or the lady cooking in the kitchen, the elderly lady. But there are things in these photographs that other people don't notice that Indian people will identify right away. What is that you always have to picture hung up on the wall way, way up high by the ceiling.

Usually it's a picture of Jesus Christ or Kennedy. You sometimes may find that picture may be beaded as well. Those are in little clues. The calendar will be hung up there and it will be ski wonkas. There will be oil cloth on the kitchen table. And when you see a sack of flour, it often won't be a five pound sack of flour. You may see a 50 pound sack of flour sitting there on the table. There are little clues to Indian life in America today that I know what I go home. I mean, I don't think of them as being Indian America set aside. But now when I looked at them in the photographs, they made that point clear to me. So I learned from them. Other people learned from them. The Indian people who came to see the show spent the whole afternoon when it first opened in Antedark, Oklahoma. And I got 20 Indian people to bring to send their works into the museum. And the Indian people came sometimes. They had to stay overnight in the town next door to get to the show. They said, why have we never seen a show like this before?

Hold on here. You are a national treasure, but I'm out of time. I need to say goodnight to our viewers. And then we can continue our conversation, okay? Thank you so much for joining us. I'm Hal Road. Goodnight. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.