The trailblazing artist and curator Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, who died in January at 85, had many firsts to her name.

She was, for example, the first Native American artist to have a work acquired by the National Gallery of Art, in 2020. But she was uninterested in being the exception. When I interviewed her on the occasion of her 2023 exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was the first retrospective of a Native artist organized by that institution, she acknowledged that her show was “breaking a barrier, opening a door, a crack.” In the next breath, she said that she hoped “others will now come behind me.”

Despite her modesty, there’s no question that Smith was unique. She was an expressive painter and avid collagist; she borrowed and drew on ancient petroglyphs, Native beadwork, Joan Mitchell’s paintings and Robert Rauschenberg’s combines, to name just a few influences. She used Indigenous imagery like the canoe and the buffalo the way Warhol used soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. In doing so, Smith claimed their status as national symbols — reminding us that the roots of America are Native.

Interconnectedness was a principle that underpinned her life and work. It came from her Salish heritage: born in Montana on the Flathead Reservation, she was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation. Smith’s father was a horse trader, and she spoke often about seeing herself in his lineage. She was “into educational trading, intellectual trading, while my father was into horse-trading, and my grandmothers ran mule-drawn salt trains into Canada to trade with the Métis/Cree peoples,” she explained in an interview for the Whitney catalog. “It all was and is about sharing beneficial goods or properties to make others’ lives better, but reciprocally we benefit, too. That is our cultural mandate.”

For Smith that meant teaching, lecturing, and writing encouraging notes to fellow artists; it also meant organizing collectives, fund-raising campaigns and exhibitions. She didn’t ask for permission to do these things, nor did she always know how she was going to go about them. Instead, she adopted a phrase that her father used to say: “When the spirit moves me.”

One story is instructive. As Smith told it, not long after she joined the board of trustees for the Institute of American Indian Arts, a school for Native Americans, she began to fear that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, which operated the institute, would close it.

So she flew to Washington, D.C., where she managed to connect with a congressional staff member who wrote legislation to turn the institute into a nonprofit. It was then introduced as an amendment to a House education bill. Smith helped organize a letter-writing campaign in support of the bill, which passed in 1986. The institute still exists today.

If this sounds like a hero’s tale, it isn’t. Smith was so humble it could be almost vexing, given how much she accomplished in her life. She narrated her stories matter-of-factly, using them as illustrative rather than to boast. But she did tell them, because she wanted people to know her — and by extension, our — history.

She curated, both solo and collaboratively, over 30 exhibitions during her career. Among them was “Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar, and Sage,” a landmark show of contemporary art by Native American women that opened at New York’s American Indian Community House in 1985. (Candice Hopkins, the executive director of the Native arts nonprofit Forge Project, has written that “Women of Sweetgrass” “enabled my own work as a curator.”)

Smith’s final curatorial project, “Indigenous Identities,” which features 90 living Native artists, opened Feb. 1 at the Zimmerli Art Museum in New Brunswick, N.J.; a small exhibition of her own work is on view alongside it.

In our conversation, Smith expressed concern that her work might look old-fashioned one day soon, especially given the current aesthetic environment. And it’s true that her paintings, with their earthy palette, as well as her prints and sculptures, can seem like outliers in the flourishing landscape of contemporary Native art, where many practitioners are riffing on Indigenous forms or new media rather than Western modernism. But Smith’s art has a force to it. It’s urgent, and its gaze is unflinching.

Smith’s messages could be harsh, as in a series of paintings she did after 9/11 and the United States’ invasion of Iraq: “The King of the Mountain” (2005) depicts several national flags, including the American flag, planted in a pile of skulls, bodies and debris. But they could also be hopeful: a decade later, that mountain became a platform for the powerful female leader in “The Speaker” (2015) to stand on. To me, though, Smith’s messages are strongest when they’re humorous — and she could be wickedly so. She laughed easily in conversation and frequently portrayed and invoked the figure of coyote, a teacher and trickster in Salish mythology, in her work.

One of my favorite series is Smith’s “Paper Dolls for a Post-Columbian World” (1991). These watercolor and graphite drawings depict a Jesuit priest and the Plenty Horses family — Ken, Barbie, and their son, Bruce — with several possible outfits. The work appears simple, bright, and cheery, until you read the text that’s handwritten alongside the clothing and betrays its ominous tone: One image offers “matching smallpox suits for all Indian families”; another shows a “Flathead headdress collected by white’s [sic] to decorate homes.” The “Paper Dolls” are a biting commentary on the genocide of Native Americans — and yet they are also, somehow, funny.

In Smith’s Whitney retrospective, the “Paper Dolls” were displayed alongside ephemera from projects marking the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the Bahamas. Smith and several other Native artists and activists had gotten together in the early 1990s and formed the Submuloc (“Columbus” spelled backward) Society, in order to counter the celebratory narrative that was then being pushed by the U.S. government. Many actions and projects grew out of that effort, from the “Paper Dolls” to two exhibitions that she curated.

In other words, her organizing fed her art, which fed her organizing, and on and on. For Smith, it was all one big process of building a network. Interconnection. While we were standing in the Whitney galleries, looking at and discussing her life’s work, she said, “It’s — what do you call it, a Möbius strip? That’s what I operate on.”