WILLIAMSBURG - Bullet holes, blood and vivid abstract images point to an American Indian perspective on Jamestown's 400th anniversary in a powerful new art exhibition here.

In a novel contribution to this year's Jamestown commemoration, the College of William and Mary's Muscarelle Museum yesterday opened a show centered on the works of Jaune Quick-To-See Smith.

Smith, whose paintings hang in New York's Whitney Museum and the Museum of Modern Art, among many others, is one of the most acclaimed American Indian artists working today. She was raised on the Flathead Reservation in Montana.

The more than 30 paintings, collages, drawings and other artworks in the show use abstract images and recognizable symbols such as canoes, buffalo and skulls to explore issues of identity, colonialism and conflict inherent in the ongoing experience of people living in a conquered land that once was theirs.

The exhibit also includes documents and artifacts from William and Mary's special collections that show Smith's contemporary work addresses the same issues that faced Virginia's Indians at the time of colonization.

"It [the exhibition] keeps saying, 'Then and now -- same stuff,'" said Aaron DeGroft, the museum's director. "This was all deliberately set out to look at some serious issues."

The show's title is "Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Contemporary Native American Paintings and the Response to Colonization . . . Anniversary of the Beginning . . . Beginning of the End."

DeGroft said he decided to offer Smith's vision as the museum's contribution to the Jamestown commemoration after being reacquainted with her work last year on a visit to MOMA.

He enlisted W&M anthropology professor Danielle Moretti-Langholtz and the school's American Indian Resource Center to assemble complementary documents and artifacts. They include a letter from Thomas Jefferson about the purchase of land from the Indians, a ledger page about the cost of clothes for Indian students at W&M and art-quality photo portraits of modern Indian leaders.

"We see Jaune as one of these leaders," said Buck Woodard, a graduate student who worked with Moretti-Langholtz and DeGroft on the exhibition. Woodard, a former Henrico County art teacher, is of Creek Indian descent.

Along with such startling imagery as human skulls and paint that drips like blood from animal forms, Smith's artworks also can be funny both in their imagery and titles. One is titled "Celebrate 40,000 years of American Art." Another is called "Where's John Lennon when we need him?"

"It's a thinking man's exhibit," Woodard said. "It isn't the Bambi school of art."