I had heard about the vanishing white American, from Trump supporters who take it as a personal threat, and here he is at last. He claims space not in a red state, but at the Whitney Museum, through August 13—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review in my latest upload.
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith painted him in a resonant white—in a canvas, like America itself, divided right down the middle. Two years later, she painted The Vanishing American as well, with equally elusive white faces above a grid of red, black, and earth tones. Patches of fabric hint at other presences as well. 
Newsprint supplies a cryptic crossword, but nothing is as cryptic as the puzzle of who will inherit a nation. Her vanishing Americans, red and white, are only snowmen. Now if only Americans had respect for each other, the planet, and art, they might have a fair chance to survive.
Smith painted The Vanishing White Man in 1992, well before MAGA and melting ice made headlines. She truly is quick to see, and Native Americans, she would like to think, have seen it all. She grew up in Montana, in the Salish and Kootenai nation, and the Pacific Northwest, before settling in New Mexico—with an extended trip northeast to see the effects of acid rain and climate change for herself. Not that this is a major work, but it says a lot about her even now at age eighty-three. I had come expecting a rehash of Native American history, not long after Kent Monkman in the Met lobby and Jimmie Durham at the Whitney itself. Instead, she keeps redefining history as central to American art.
She has her indigenous imagery, like horses on the Great Plains and, a title has it, Women Who Run with the Wolves. She herself had a horse named Cheyenne. Unstretched canvas recalls bison hides, but also women’s craft in clothing. Canoes are a reminder of a native people’s “water memories.” Yet her imagery belongs to all Americans, and it seems to vanish before one’s eyes. It leaves something close to abstraction.
Assemblage, too, may accord with craft traditions, but not only that, not after Robert Rauschenberg. Her loose canvas could cover Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat. The curators, Laura Phipps with Caitlin Chaisson, compare her to Marisol in hacked wood and Edward Kienholz with his sinister but clunky assemblage. More often, though, Smith’s collage sticks to two dimensions, like the newsprint of The Vanishing American. More often, too, it lies over brushwork right out of postwar American art. The curators speak, too, of her affinities with Neo-Expressionism from the very same years, but once again she goes further back.
Expecting folk art and nothing but folk art? Smith counts, no doubt, as an outsider artist, but she refuses to see her heritage as primitive. The Vanishing White Man has its nearly transparent whites, not far from Agnes Martin and Robert Ryman. Its companion painting has its bare canvas and sharp, rough squares of red and black. Its edgy drawing contains the mark of her brush, pencil, and pen. It also plays against the grid.
This is still political art, however abstract, but it also keeps its sense of humor. The three circles apiece of her snowmen would earn a smile even without the contrast to their looser, more sophisticated backdrop. More collage in The Vanishing American adds “best if used by 2000,” but its date is already past. Smith has the kind of humor that trades on two sides to every story without abandoning a sense of right and wrong. Like the snowmen, this is America in red and white. Tease out what that means and you have the arc of her career.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.