Unidentified Indians with white children
Photographer unknown
[BANC PIC 1967.028--PIC carton 5 folder 2]

GERALD CASSIDY PAPERS
Photograph. Unidentified Indians with white children.

The Cassidy Papers contain extensive quantities of photographs, including formal portraits and casual snapshots.

This photograph of an Indian group, taken by an unknown photographer, includes two young white children dressed in their finest clothes. The dichotomy here is striking, as two worlds intersect for the camera lens.

Gerald Cassidy was raised in Cincinnati and studied there at the Art Institute under Frank Duveneck, who had also taught Joseph Sharp and Walter Ufer. In 1898, after a period in New York where he worked as a commercial artist, Cassidy contracted tuberculosis and was sent to a sanitarium in Albuquerque. His health improved and, finding that he loved the New Mexico landscape and its people, he began to paint the local Indians.

In 1912 Cassidy married the sculptor, Ina Sizer, and he soon abandoned commercial illustration and concentrated on painting. Cassidy's reputation as a painter was established in 1915 when he received the grand prize and gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Diego for a series of murals for the Indian Arts Building, which depicted the life of the Southwestern Indians.