Fruitmarket in Edinburgh is showing the first public posthumous exhibition of the work of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (1940–2025). An artist, activist, educator and curator, Jaune was an enrolled member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Nation, and this exhibition was conceived in conversation with her: it will be the first time her work has been seen in Scotland, and the most significant European institutional show of her work to date.

The exhibition’s title Wilding came from the artist, who, when the exhibition was first mooted, wanted it to engage with the history and politics of land stewardship, and the historic links her tribe shares with Scotland, through Charles Duncan McDonald (1897–1995), who was a founding member of the Tribal Council of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and whose grandfather emigrated from Loch Torridon in 1838. Both he and Jaune shared an interest in who owns, controls and cares for the land – in Scotland and the US: an interest that informed her dedication to justice and visibility for Native American people, past, present and in the future.

Enjoying a fifty-year career, Quick-to-See Smith made art, curated exhibitions, mentored fellow artists and delivered workshops in schools and on reservations, together bearing witness to the situation of Native Americans from a Native American perspective: her paintings, prints, collages, sculptures and assemblages embodying a deeply-felt hope for equality and mutual respect for land, nature and humans: she said, ‘My work comes right from a visceral place – deep deep – as though my roots extend beyond the soles of my feet into sacred soils. Can I take those feelings and attach them to the passer-by? To my dying breath, and my last tube of burnt sienna, I will try.’

Admission is free.