Sacred Legacy Exhibition Opens at Mille Lacs Indian Museum

Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian

Fantastic News! Having traveled to over 50 countries, 100 venues & to every continent but Antarctica, our world-wide traveling exhibition of Edward Curtis’ imagery is making it’s North American debut at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum in Onamia, Minnesota. The purpose of this exhibition is to honor and celebrate our Native peoples and their stories, their history, and their culture as well as the beauty and power of Edward Curtis’ photography.















This 50 print exhibition not only contains many of Curtis’ signature images, but also highlights the now rare photographic processes that Curtis worked in, including platinum/palladium, goldtone, cyanotype, photogravure, goldtone, gelatin silver and gum bichromate. In addition, the imagery highlights many of the geographic regions that Curtis photographed.

Today Curtis’ work stands as a landmark in the history of photographs, book publishing, ethnography, and the American West.

Viewed in its entirety, Curtis’ work presents an historical record of enormous importance. Edward S. Curtis and his Native co-creators preserved for future generations an important era in American history and provided an opportunity to understand the American Indian experience. Perhaps the most important legacy of Curtis’s monumental accomplishment is the expression of an extraordinary and deeply felt empathy with the personal, emotional, and spiritual lives of the American Indian. In this respect, Edward S. Curtis’ work stands alone.


Exhibition Dates
June 30, 2012 – September 16, 2012 • Minnesota Historical Society, Mille Lacs Indian Museum, Onamia, Minnesota
November 1, 2012 – December 30, 2012 • Hennepin County Library, Minneapolis Central, Minnesota
January 14, 2013 – February 8, 2013 • Minnesota State University Campus, Moorhead, Minnesota

This exhibition has been organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, Minneapolis, in collaboration with Christopher Cardozo Fine Arts, the Minnesota Council of Regional Public Library Administrators (CRPLSA) and the Mille Lacs Indian Museum and Trading Post.

The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography has been working for nearly a decade in partnership with Christopher Cardozo Fine Art to present this historic exhibition. The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography is a Minnesota-based 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation founded in 2003 to produce and promote significant, uniquely conceived exhibitions of photographic art.