Jo-An Smith Sequestered Oil on Panel — Gila Cliff Dwelling Landscape

Sequestered by Jo-An Smith is an expressive oil painting that evokes the rugged grandeur of the Gila Cliff Dwellings in southwestern New Mexico. In molten tones of crimson, gold, and sienna, Smith transforms the ancient sandstone alcoves and ancestral dwellings of the Mogollon people into a sweeping, almost cosmic landscape. The arched rock formations, glowing with desert light, frame a cluster of adobe-like structures that seem both timeless and fragile—symbols of human endurance against nature’s immensity.

Smith’s background as a metalsmith informs her painterly technique; the textured surface and sculptural application of paint create a tactile interplay of light and shadow reminiscent of carved stone and sun-baked earth. The result is a powerful homage to the Southwest’s sacred geography—a landscape both literal and spiritual. Presented in a luminous gilt wood frame, Sequestered stands as a meditation on solitude, shelter, and the passage of time.

Details:

• Artist: Jo-An Smith (American, b. 20th century)
• Title: Sequestered
• Medium: Oil on Canvas Panel
• Signature: Signed lower right “Jo-An Smith”
• Frame: Gilt wood frame (without glass)
• Provenance: Private collection, New Mexico
• Location: Las Cruces, NM, USA

Condition:
Excellent, No Damage

Size:
Overall: 17.75" X 20.75" X 1.5"
Visible: 10.25" X 13.25"

Artist Biography: Jo-An Smith (American, 20th–21st Century)

Jo-An Smith is a New Mexico–based painter, designer, and metalsmith whose work reflects the vivid spirit and rugged beauty of the American Southwest. Her career spans more than five decades of creative practice in both fine art and jewelry design, blending a designer’s precision with a painter’s emotional expressiveness.

Born and raised in the Southwest, Smith earned her B.A. in Art and Design from the University of Texas at El Paso in 1971 and later received an M.A. in Art/Design (Studio Emphasis) from New Mexico State University in 1975. She also completed training at the Gemological Institute of America, which led to a successful parallel career as a goldsmith and jewelry designer. For over forty years, she worked as a resident designer at the Cutter Gallery in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where her work attracted national and international clientele.

Smith’s artistic vision is deeply shaped by the desert landscape that surrounds her. Her oil and watercolor paintings often depict Southwestern mesas, adobe dwellings, ancient cliff structures, and celestial skies in compositions that balance geometric form with organic motion. Using rich, textural layers and radiant color palettes—frequently dominated by reds, oranges, and golds—her paintings convey both the heat and isolation of desert life as well as its transcendent beauty.

In her visual language, Smith explores themes of isolation, endurance, and harmony between nature and architecture, often drawing parallels between the permanence of stone and the fragility of human habitation. Her painterly style reflects the same attention to texture, surface, and light that characterized her jewelry designs—where metals and gemstones were used to evoke landscapes in miniature.

Over the course of her career, Jo-An Smith has exhibited widely throughout the Southwest, and her works are held in numerous private and public collections across the United States and abroad. She has been featured in Who’s Who in American Art and Who’s Who of American Women and is recognized as both a Signature Member of the New Mexico Watercolor Society and a member of the Society of North American Goldsmiths.

Her paintings—like Sequestered, an evocative depiction of desert solitude—embody the luminous atmosphere and spiritual stillness of the Southwestern landscape, rendered through a distinctly modern, expressionist lens.