Events

April 2007

President Janez Drnovšek Visits Native American Photo Exhibit, Ljubljana, April 20

President Janez Drnovšek paid a visit to the “Sacred Legacy: Edward Curtis and the North American Indian” photography exhibit at the Slovene Ethnographic Museum on April 20.  President Drnovšek was accompanied by Ambassador and Antoinette Robertson and museum director Bojana Rogelj Škafar.  A guided tour of the exhibition was provided by Professor Mojca TerÄ?elj from the University of Primorska.  The exhibition, a joint project by the U.S. Embassy and the Ethnographic Museum, captures the broad and extraordinary diversity among the North American tribes from the Northwest Coast to the Southwest and the Great Plains. 

The exhibition is also a tribute to Edward Curtis and his life’s work.  It took Curtis twenty-four years to complete the project, at the end of which he had lost his family, his health, and his wealth.  However, with the assistance and patronage of several preeminent individuals, including J.P. Morgan, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Carnegie, and the kings of both England and Belgium, Curtis succeeded in creating a photo-ethnographic study, The North American Indian, that was widely hailed as the finest and most ambitious set of limited-edition books ever made in America by a single man.  In 1911, the New York Herald said that it was the most gigantic undertaking since the publication of the King James Edition of the Bible.

The exhibition will run at the Ethnographic Museum through May 2, 2007.  It will then open at the Regional Museum in Koper on May 8, 2007.

President Drnovšek with Ambassador Robertson, Director Bojana Rogelj Škafar and Professor Mojca TerÄ?el

President Drnovšek views an Edward Curtis photograph

Ambassador and Antoinette Robertson present President Drnovšek with a book of Curtis’ photography