The Charles M. Bair Family Museum’s 2017 season opens Friday, May 26

The Bair Family Museum is proud to present a major exhibition of the Bair Collection’s Curtis photogravures entitled, The Shadow Catcher: Edward Sheriff Curtis, from May 26 – October 29, 2017, in the Montana Projects and Curtis Galleries. The selection of over 40 original photogravures is drawn from Volumes I-5, The North American Indian series.

 Photo credit: Sioux Chiefs, Vol. 3, Plate 78, Bair Collection

Over the winter Bair Museum staff worked to install LED lighting in the exhibit spaces. Eliminating damaging UV light sources has provided additional exhibition space to showcase a larger selection of the museum’s 180-plus Curtis collection. John Andrew & Son of Boston, under Curtis’s direction, printed the photogravures, circa 1906-1908, on delicate, almost transparent, Japanese tissue paper. This summer’s exhibit includes images representing the following tribes: the Apache, Jicarillas, Navajo, Pima, Papago, Qahatika, Mojave, Yuma, Maricopa, Walapai, Havasupai, Apache-Mojave (Yavapai), Teton Sioux, Yanktonai, Assiniboin, Apsaroke (Crows), Mandan, Arikara, and the Atsina.

The photographer and self-trained ethnographer Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) met Charles Bair in Montana in the early 1900s. They became friends and their families would socialize in the winter months at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, where Curtis had a studio and gallery, as did Charlie Russell and Joseph Henry Sharp. Between 1901 and 1930 Curtis photographed over 80 tribes. To provide the funding for his planned series documenting all Native American tribes in North America, Curtis originally intended to sell subscriptions only to those who pre-purchased the 20 volume series. Due to the project’s enormous scope and escalating costs, Curtis immediately ran into financial difficulties, and Charlie Bair likely offered to purchase the first five volumes to help out his friend.  Even with the support of President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote the foreword for the first volume of The North American Indian series, as well as financial backing from financier J. Pierpont Morgan, the project took over thirty years to complete and eventually bankrupted Curtis and ruined his life and his health.

Located in Martinsdale, the Bair Museum features several galleries where visitors can enjoy the family’s eclectic collection of Native American objects, Western and European paintings, and Navajo weavings. Tours of the Bair family home showcase Marguerite and Alberta Bair’s stunning collection of English silver and European antiques. This summer the museum also features work by Bozeman painter Harold Schlotzhauer in Above and Beyond- Paintings as Kites, in the museum’s lobby. Beginning Memorial Day weekend, the Charles M. Bair Family Museum will be open seven days a week through Labor Day from 10 am to 5 pm. The museum is located at 2751 Montana Hwy 294 in Martinsdale, Montana, between White Sulphur Springs and Harlowton. For more information visit www.bairfamilymuseum.org