Etching and Erasure: The Colonialist Photography of Edward S. Curtis
Etching and Erasure: The Colonialist Photography of Edward S. Curtis
February 18-April 18, 2025
A virtual exhibition curated by master’s degree students in
St. John’s University’s Museum Administration program
Enter the virtual exhibition HERE
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A virtual exhibition curated by master’s degree students in
St. John’s University’s Museum Administration program
Enter the virtual exhibition HERE
The Dr. M.T. Geoffrey Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University is pleased to announce the opening of the virtual exhibition, Etching and Erasure: The Colonialist Photography of Edward Curtis (1907-1930) curated by students in the Museum Administration program: Kacey Bejado ‘25, Owen Lockwood ‘25, Zachary Pablo ‘25, and Liberty Sova. This exhibition invites viewers to critically examine Edward S. Curtis’s extensive, yet deeply problematic, documentation of Indigenous cultures through the medium of photography.
A virtual curator-led guided walk-through tour will take place on March 19, 2025 from 6:00-7:30. Register here.
Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952), is best known for his twenty-volume series, The North American Indian (1908–1930), a massive project supported by financier J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt. The volumes include over 2,200 images and accompanying ethnographic texts, recording what Curtis and his sponsors viewed as a “vanishing” Indigenous race—a perspective that dominated treatment of Indigenous peoples worldwide, from the first ‘discovery’ of the Americas and far into the twentieth century. Curtis's promotion of this false narrative not only commodified Indigenous material culture but also facilitated the commercial sale of his negatives during and after his lifetime, a legacy that has contributed to contemporary hesitancy to both showcase and critically engage with his works.
Most curators and scholars have centered attention on Curtis’s controversial portraits of Indigenous people. This exhibition is the first to showcase his depictions of material culture, including architecture, masks, and ceremonial regalia. Foregrounding lesser-known works, the students designed a novel presentation, shifting focus to an unstudied facet of Curtis’s oeuvre with the goal of sparking dialogue about the photographer’s controversial work and its role in shaping harmful misperceptions of Indigenous peoples.
Long critiqued for his colonialist, extractive, staged representations, Curtis worked photographing Indigenous people but did not bring to this project a rigorous methodology. He relied on the collaboration of Indigenous individuals, whose contributions go unacknowledged in his publications; Curtis often coerced Indigenous collaborators into complying with his demands, leading scholars to question his project’s exploitative nature and fueling academic condemnation and outright censorship and silence regarding Curtis’s work.
Addressing these contradictions, the exhibition highlights the ethical challenges inherent in any presentation of Curtis’s photographs while also reframing the works within essential Indigenous narratives of agency and resistance in the face of settler colonialism. Due to the offensive images and text compiled in The North American Indian, a product of early 20th-century American views of race, culture, and creed, the works presented should be viewed as historical artifacts of a past era: neither the students nor St. John’s University endorses views expressed by Curtis or outdated material that is addressed in this exhibition.
Sourced from Northwestern University’s Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, this virtual exhibition features 24 images from 11 different volumes of The North American Indian, organized into nine sections that follow a chronological exploration of Curtis’s project. Beginning with the origins of the project and the financial and political forces that propelled it, the exhibition examines Curtis’s role as an uninvited witness in Indigenous communities and highlights the photogravure process that defines his artistic practice. It explores his deliberate and self-documented acts of staging and manipulation, the use of photography as a tool of settler colonialism, and his role in the commodification and commercialization of Indigenous culture. The exhibition concludes by addressing Curtis’s invasive fascination with the American Southwest and his contradictory ventures to document “uncontacted” Indigenous groups in the North.
In conjunction with the exhibition, the front room of the Yeh Art Gallery—an interactive reading and learning space—hosts a curated selection of books related to the exhibition’s themes until March 22nd. Visitors can explore a range of publications while navigating through the online exhibition at a computer station in the reading room. Titles such as Unraveling Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian and An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States offer further context for the exhibition research, while additional titles provide an opportunity to learn about the work of contemporary Native American artists such as Raven Chacon, Sky Hopinka and others.
You can find more information about the M.A. Museum Administration program here. Or contact the program’s founding director/coordinator, Dr. Susan Rosenberg (rosenbs3@stjohns.edu).
Image Credit:
Edward S. Curtis (American, 1868-1952), Kaiak Frame – Nunivak, 1928, photogravure, Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University Library