If you haven't yet made it out to see Contemporary Native Photographers and the Edward Curtis Legacy at PAM, remedy that soon! You have until May 8. But you may want to go this week, since one of the show's featured artists, Will Wilson, will be making an appearance.

I covered Contemporary Native Photographers last month, and it's an inventive, darkly funny, endlessly interesting show, featuring photographers Zig Jackson, Wendy Red Star, and Wilson, responding to the problematic legacy of photographer Edward Curtis, who photographed indigenous people in the United States. His images have real archival value, but they were nonetheless framed in some pretty damaging ways that the artists of this show deconstruct, with a particular focus on destabilizing the traditional relationship between photographer and subject. Here's what I wrote about that:

If you go to one art show a year, this should be it. We need exhibitions that interrogate how art has perpetuated unfair power dynamics—and how it subverts them. The exhibit's popularity would seem to back me up: I went on a weekday morning, often a dead time for galleries, and the show was packed.

When Wilson comes to town this week, he'll discuss his project, Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX), which, as I wrote in my review of the show, differs from most approaches to portraiture in a number of meaningful ways. Wilson uses an old-fashioned wet-plate process, and focuses on the relationship between the photographer and sitter, rather than a one-sided interaction. True to this intention, he gives the original image to its subject.

He'll be at PAM this Friday, April 9 at 11 am.