The Shadow Catcher: Edward Sheriff Curtis Exhibition
Kathryn Schorr, Owner of Baker Schorr. Baker Schorr Fine Art. Ally Village, 200 Spring Park Drive, Suite 105. Midland, Texas, 79705.
MIDLAND, TX.- If you aren’t familiar with Midland, Texas, sometimes referred to as ‘the biggest little city in Texas’, you don’t know what you’re missing. The sophisticated city of 150,000 residents is a key player in the energy business, located in the middle of some of the richest oil fields in the United States. Midland’s philanthropic, cultured and hospitable residents are enjoying a new addition to their art scene. Since 2018, Midland has been home to Baker Schorr Fine Art, a world-class gallery with a substantial inventory of 19th and 20th century American and European as well as Modern and contemporary works. Baker Schorr’s exhibition program is diverse and lively.
February 24 to April 8, Baker Schorr will present The Shadow Catcher: Edward Sheriff Curtis and the North American Indian, an exhibition of photogravures from Curtis’ 20-volume work, The North American Indian. These powerful and hauntingly beautiful images illuminate the rich culture, religion, and way of life of numerous North American tribes and reflect the profound mutual respect shared by Curtis and the Indians he photographed.
From 1900 to 1930 the American photographer, Edward Sheriff Curtis traveled and lived among more than eighty indigenous American tribal groups west of the Mississippi, from the Mexican border to northern Alaska. His photographs captured their authentic ways of life producing 40,000 extremely fragile glass plate negatives that were often damaged, 10,000 wax cylinders of recordings and 4,000 pages of anthropological text.
From his dedicated efforts culminated the publication of The North American Indian. This publication consists of twenty volumes of text each containing seventy-five small hand-pulled photogravures and twenty portfolios with thirty-six large format hand-pulled photogravures to accompany each volume. This is the most extensive and expensive photographic project ever undertaken in the history of photography.
For thirty years Curtis would pack his cameras and supplies needed for months traveling by foot and by horses with covered wagons deep into Indian territories. His personal reputation and relationship within each tribe was a trusted one and his respect for them was legendary and they called him “The Shadow Catcher.” Curtis worked out of the belief that Native Americans were “a vanishing race” that desperately needed to be documented before “White” expansion and the Federal Government destroyed what remained of their native ways of life.
With the backing of men like J. Pierpont Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt and at great expense to his family life and his health, Curtis’s calling and dedication never ceased. He lived among dozens of tribes and devoted his life to definitive and monumental work The North American Indian. The New York Herald hailed it as “The most ambitious enterprise in publishing since the King James Bible.”
We are living in a time in history when our humanity can seem all but lost, which makes this body of work all the more poignant. Kiowa novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote, "...Never before have we seen the Indians of North America so close to the origins of their humanity ... Curtis’ photographs comprehend indispensable images of every human being at every time, in every place.”
