Two Fervent Exhibitions At The Whitney Re-Imagine Our ‘American’ Identities

Painterly drips draw us into the monumental canvas, navigating our gaze across the map embellished with newspaper clips of ads promoting a community bank and gas-guzzling cars, comic strips, and messages of border Imperialism. The play of textures – two panels of oil, paper, newspaper, and fabric on canvas – enhance our experience wrangling the complex narrative of Indigenous identity and life in the United States.

Indian Map (1992) is among more than 130 provocative works revealing the depth and breadth of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s oeuvre as part of Memory Map, the artist’s largest and most comprehensive retrospective and the first showcasing an Indigenous artist organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Smith, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, Montana, takes us on an emotional voyage spanning Abstraction, Pop Art, and Neo-Expressionism, telling stories through her singular visual language punctuated with recurring imagery of flags, horses, bison, and canoes, and told with repurposed materials such as newspaper, fabric, and commercial objects. We can’t ignore her calls for awareness and action to address ecological devastation, historical lies, racisim, Imperialism, and the genocide of Native Americans, without alienating or offending her audience.

“Smith is not only a monumental artist but also a mentor, exemplar, and powerful influence to younger generations of Native American artists. She has brought exposure and offered encouragement to hundreds of Indigenous artists over her career. This exhibition encourages us to look at Smith and her peers anew, to be mindful of our prejudices, and to be vigilant and self-critical in our use of art historical labels and frameworks in our work moving forward,” said Adam D. Weinberg, the Whitney’s Alice Pratt Brown Director, who plans to step down at the end of his current contract, on October 31. Scott Rothkopf, the Whitney’s current Senior Deputy Director and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator, will become the director on November 1, building on Weinberg’s three decades of high-level leadership positions at the museum.

Laura Phipps, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who organized the exhibition with Caitlin Chaisson, Curatorial Project Assistant, said “Learning from Jaune has been a perspective-shifting experience, and it is thrilling to have the opportunity to share her life’s work with our audiences at the Whitney.”

Installed thematically across the Whitney’s third and fifth floors, the exhibition opened yesterday alongside Josh Kline: Project for a New American Century on the fifth and eight floors, which delves deep into how climate change, automation, contagion, and politics shape work and life in twenty-first century America.

The simultaneous openings, featuring two distinctive artists wrangling complementary subjects, shock, empower, amuse, and enlighten us, rewriting art history from two revolutionary perspectives. We can’t look away from these visceral works which expose the injustices of everyday life in the U.S. Both shows are on view through August 13, offering a wide array of content in context that debunks myths and amplifies Others. Both artists present a broad range of powerful works across mediums and subjects that compel us to reconsider our preconceived notions, forcing us into uncomfortable dialogues that are too easily avoided in everyday life.

Kline’s Blue Collars (2014–2020) series of stand-alone sculptural portraits and video interviews of working people in the U.S. is especially disturbing and engrossing. Inspired by the Great Recession that lingered from late 2007 through 2009, Kline began investigating how folks without college degrees endure dehumanizing labor and service jobs that fail to provide a living wage.

Kline paid delivery people, restaurant servers, and hotel room cleaners for 3D scans of their heads, arms, and legs, so he could create full-color 3D-printed sculptures that will make your skin crawl. The same workers are interviewed on video about their jobs, ambitions, political views, and their feelings about life in general.

“Josh Kline has had the uncanny ability to hone in on the most important issues of the day and create art that is disturbingly urgent,” said Weinberg. “Watching the magnetic attraction of viewers to his work is astonishing: they are simultaneously enraptured, bewildered, and repulsed. Kline’s art is radical, uncompromising, and looks unblinkingly at the possible future.”

Christopher Y. Lew, former Nancy and Fred Poses Curator at the Whitney and current Chief Artistic Director at the Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art, who organized the exhibition with McClain Groff, Curatorial Project Assistant, said “It has been thrilling to follow his practice over more than a decade and it’s a great privilege to organize his major mid-career survey at the Whitney Museum of American Art.”

Human precarity, whether it’s through slaughter and mistreatment of native peoples on their land or from not being able to pay rent or buy groceries, is too often dismissed. Smith and Kline don’t let us walk away ignorant. It’s only through such visceral or emotional art that we begin to learn empathy and identify with the marginalized, seeing ourselves in Others. Art isn’t always pretty pictures. The Whitney takes a brave stance by presenting two artists who make us confront the horrors of everyday life for too many people in the U.S. This is American art. This is highly-charged art that pushes us beyond our comfort zone in order to broaden our understanding of how Others live and how we fit into the big picture of human existence.

“The oldest art museum in New York was inaugurated sometime in the late 1800s, 150 years ago, and there are younger art museums approximately 90 years old, yet I am the first Native woman to have a major retrospective in New York City,” said Smith. “The Whitney has jumped off the cliff and shattered the status quo. Hallelujah for them making this risky move. For what is the risk worth? It offers us more Native artists, the Nation’s First Peoples, our Original Peoples, to become part of the mainstream art world. I am deeply grateful to the Whitney, as well as Garth Greenan Gallery, for their kind, supportive, diligent work over four years. We are making history; we are plowing new ground; we are opening a staid, closed, colonial door.”

Kline has lived and worked in New York for more than two decades, reacting to national and global events as a New Yorker, yet his work has rarely been displayed in the city.

“It means so much to show this work in the city where it was conceived, at this time, and at the Whitney Museum of American Art,” said Kline. “I can’t wait to bring it all home to NYC and to have a very intense conversation with the public about America’s past, present, and future.”