The artistic practice of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith centers around one simple aim: “examining contemporary life in America and interpreting it through Native ideology.” Smith was born in 1940, in a small town on the Flathead Reservation, in Montana. Her first name, Jaune, means “yellow” in French; Quick-to-See was given to her by her Shoshone grandmother, who noticed that Jaune was a particularly quick-witted baby. As a child, she bounced around different reservations with her single father, a horse trader, living in poverty. Though she later graduated from Framingham State College, in Massachusetts, and attended graduate school in New Mexico, Smith never quite forgot her early feelings of alienation. Over a five-decade career, she’s used prints, paintings, and sculpture to reappropriate history. Smith is now 83 and this is her first New York retrospective. —Elena Clavarino