t was game-changing when the West came east in the exhibition , which opened at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art in 2023, establishing Smith (Confederated Salish, Kootenai) as the first Native American artist with a retrospective that the prestigious institution has itself organized. Show curator Laura Phipps believes Smith just might be the most important Native artist alive, having had almost 100 solo shows and major museum acquisitions. “She’s both the most prolific and the most influential artist of her generation, and that has, a show of nearly 50 intergenerational Indigenous artists, for the National Gallery of Art, on view in Washington, D.C., through January 15.
