Press release

In 1890 the US Census Bureau declared the United States fully developed and settled. Leading up to that, Indigenous peoples had been robbed of their lands, railroads had been built in all parts of the country, and the first national parks had been established. That same decade, the first souvenir postcards were produced with color photographs of the US. Using the latest photochrome process, black-and-white negatives were colorized, reproduced on a mass scale, and marketed on the new traveling routes: between New York and Yellowstone, Florida and Chicago, up to seven million postcards were printed every year, creating a view of America that excluded more than it revealed.

De/Collecting Memories begins where the postcard motifs end and examines what they exclude and block out. The purportedly untouched nature depicted in the colorful images constituted the living space and cultural environment of the Indigenous population long before white people made it accessible to tourists and settled it and stipulated what narratives were to be told. The exhibition brings together holdings from the museum's photography collection with the work Sky Dances Light from 2024, an installation of clouds made of tin bells by US-american Indigenous artist Marie Watt (born 1967 in Seattle, Washington). 

Curators: Miriam Szwast and Santi Grunewald