In 1992, planned celebrations for the quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’s landing in the Americas provoked a powerful response from artists and activists. They sought to raise awareness of how Columbus’s arrival set in motion one of the largest and most sustained genocides in human history. Smith was remarkably prolific during this period, creating dozens of new works and collaborating with fellow artists on exhibitions and events. Smith and a group of her friends formed the Submuloc Society, making T-shirts and pins and organizing activities for anti-celebrations. “Submuloc” is “Columbus” backward and this was a goal of the society—to reverse or counter the popular stories of European contact.
Though Smith’s politics had always imbued her work, this particular moment in American history compelled her to be more direct. Her desire for clarity and transparency led the artist to pursue immediately recognizable imagery, such as the trade canoe and bison, and to explore these iconic motifs through collage. Smith’s incorporation of clippings from newspapers, magazines, and books recalls the methods of artists like Robert Rauschenberg, but her approach differs: Smith leans into, rather than away from, the cultural significance and authority that printed matter can convey. These works confront the violence of displacement and the extreme inequities of the earliest negotiations between Indigenous peoples and settlers in North America.
