In A Cloudy Day, 1992, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith uses abstraction and text towards political means in art. The present work was created the year after the artist’s Ode to Chief Seattle series, 1989-1991, which paid homage to Chief Si’ahl (Seattle), a 19th century Duwamish and Squamish leader who emphasized the interdependence of humanity and nature in his activist work.
A Cloudy Day picks up on the environmentalist and Indigenous rights themes of the Chief Seattle series; a hazy wash covers the painting, reminiscent of acid rain, a major environmentalist platform in the early 1990s. Black text crowds into the space between abstracted tree trunks and red and green clouds of leaves. The text is a vocabulary of burgeoning late 20th century capitalism, with references to the stock market, white collar crime, and globalization. But placed in a painted forest setting, the words transform, and recall the violence enacted against Indigenous Americans by settlers. Do “terms,” for example, refer to the terms of a financial contract, or the terms of violated treaties between Indigenous and settler populations?
The text in A Cloudy Day provides a matrix upon which Smith adds contemporary and real meaning to an otherwise abstract landscape. As a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Smith believes that her “life’s work involves examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” A Cloudy Day accomplishes this intersection, placing the language of settler American capitalism in a forest setting, where the presence of trees, and their Indigenous painter, color the viewer’s understanding of the words. A Cloudy Day weaves together the binaries of natural and corporate, Indigenous and settler, textual and abstract, in one, united composition.
