Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits

Meet the Curator


Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits



Video Transcription

My name is Michelle Delaney and I'm currently the Smithsonian's Consortium Director for Understanding the American Experience. But for the previous twenty years, I was also Curator of Photography at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. While there I was able to work with a wonderful collection, a unique collection of Gertrude Käsebier photographs of Sioux Indians traveling with Buffalo Bill's Wild West during the 1898 season. For many years, I helped researchers look at the collection, think about the collection, and there were a few images that were published, but I knew that for the more than 100 images and also fifteen drawings that the Indians had made for her that the public really didn't know the depth of this personal project that Käsebier had begun more than a century ago.

I thought about what kind of project I might want to do. It's a project that would bring not only the notion of mass entertainment at the turn of the century and the large tent shows and circuses and traveling theatrical shows that were happening at that time where thousands of people could see Buffalo Bill and the Indians and the Rough Riders working daily on the different segments of the show and thinking about what kind of transition there was going on at that point for Native Americans here in the United States. And also the myth and the reality of what the American West was. I thought that this project working with the Käsebier photographs had the opportunity to bring together many different facets of history at the turn of the century United States—and also elevate Käsebier and her position as a leading portraitist at the time.

So I talked to a few people about the possibility of doing a book project or an exhibition of this collection and I was able to form a very good relationship with the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Thinking about how to interpret these images, research the collections in Cody, Wyoming, and also bring to the forefront the Smithsonian's collection—these beautiful platinum prints of the Sioux Indians who traveled with the Wild West in 1898.


Video produced and edited by, Rebecca Wingo, University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Videography, Jeremy Goodman, Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Featuring, Michelle Delaney, Smithsonian Institution

The William F. Cody Archive
codyarchive.org
2013

Senior Digital Editor, Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University