[Un]Framed: Indigenous Peoples and Lands in Focus
April 24 - May 17, 2025
Throughout the 1870s and 1880s, US expeditions and the photographers who accompanied them helped shape a vision of the land and Indigenous peoples steeped in imperialist thinking. The photographic prints in this exhibition are the work of expedition photographers William Henry Jackson and John K. Hillers.
However, Indigenous peoples today give these photographs a new focus. By asserting the right for tribes to interpret their own visual histories, these new readings disrupt the settler gaze and restore self-representation.
The exhibition of eighteen albumen prints in the GW Collection was curated by Museum Studies students in consultation with the Zuni and Hopi Tribes and the Diné Nation, whose ancestors are pictured in the photographs. Students in Interaction Design created the two digital elements.
Support for this exhibition is provided by the following:
Francine Zorn Trachtenberg Fund for Photography
Friends of the Luther W. Brady Art Gallery