ND Native photographer featured in San Francisco Museum of Modern Art exhibition
Zig Jackson first American Indian to earn photography degree from San Francisco Art Institute
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Zig Jackson, citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, is seen here larger than life in a self portrait on March 7, 2025, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (Photo Credit: Jodi Rave Spotted Bear).
Zig Jackson, a Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation citizen, grew up on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota where his father encouraged him to explore life beyond his home community. This led Jackson to a storied career culminating in a lifetime of photography achievements, including a current photo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Jackson is among a select group of photographers who have captured the essence of San Francisco life in the SFMOMA exhibit “Around Group f.64: Legacies and Counterhistories in Bay Area Photography,” which will end in July. His work focuses on his 1990s series “Indian Man in San Francisco,” a series of self-portraits made while a graduate student at the San Francisco Art Institute. His photography reminds viewers that Indigenous people exist everywhere.
The Group f.64 was inspired by luminary Bay area figures including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston, who formed the group to reject Pictorialism photography, a mimic of paintings. Instead, the group preferred photography with clarity and depth of field that could be achieved with the f.64 camera lens setting.
Famed photographer Adams encouraged the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1935 – now known as SFMOMA – to collect and exhibit photographs as fine art. Adams also helped found the California School of Fine Arts, later known as the San Francisco Art Institute. Jackson, also known as Rising Buffalo, became the first Native to earn a graduate degree in photography from SFAI.
“The school was the first in the country to teach photography as an art form, rather than a commercial craft, and many of the early instructors there were members of Group f.64 or affiliated with them,” according to SFMOMA. “For seventy-five years, before the school’s closing in 2023, the photography program at CSFA/SFAl produced many illustrious alumni.” The SFMOMA Group f.64 exhibit features work from the early group’s founder and examines later local photography developments.
SFAI “illustrious alumni” in the Group f.64 exhibit includes Jackson, Jim Goldberg, Janet Delaney, and Catherine Opie. Jackson’s work has been featured in numerous exhibitions at colleges and museums nationwide. He also has a photo exhibition set to open at the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York from May 10 to Nov. 9.
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