Tamrind Art Inst. Lithography
Edward Curtis' Last Photograph
EDWARD CURTIS' LAST PHOTOGRAPH lithograph looks at Eddie’s last photo. He is in Tlingit country after being beat up by one of my fierce Great-Aunties. He was being snotty at the wrong time and the wrong place and she simply leveled his ass. Later he was doing his usual thing of dressing up Indians in costumes from the trunk of his car when he figured out at the last moment that these were two Tlingit warriors who were not as gentle as Great-Auntie and for some reason it was the last photograph he ever made.
What informs these two lithographs is the fact that Edward Curtis carried around the romanticized notion that his mythological Indians were a vanishing race until the day he died in 1952, and it drove the look and feel of his work. I would have loved to have lifted one of his dying eyelids open, looked him straight in the eye, and whispered, ‘We're still here-- a lot of us are still here Eddie…’ but I wasn't born for another three years. Dang. On the other hand, I guess it was poetic justice that he was the one that was vanished a few years before I arrived... maybe he should have titled his work ‘The Vanishing White Man’ instead…
This was one of two lightographs made at the Crow's Shadow Art Institute as a part of the "Migrations, New Directions in Native American Art" project sponsored by the Tamarind Art Institute in Albuquerque in 2004. Hand made lithograph collaboration with Master Printer Frank Jenzen, 22" x 30".
