Lights, camera, action! The Journey Museum and Learning Center is excited to announce the next event in its Fall Learning Forum series, “Bill Groethe – Unfiltered”. Beginning at 2 p.m. on Saturday, October 27th, Steve Babbitt, professor of Art/Mass Communication at BHSU, will interview William “Bill” Groethe, local nonagenarian photographer who photographed the last eight survivors of the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn.
Groethe was the only professional photographer who attended the 1948 reunion of the eight remaining survivors of Battle of the Little Bighorn. The people in the photo are Little Warrior, Pemmican, Little Soldier, Dewey Beard, High Eagle, Iron Hawk, Comes Again, and Nicholas Black Elk. John Sitting Bull, present in the photo though not a survivor, represented his adoptive father Sitting Bull. Over many decades, beginning in the 1930s, Groethe took photographs of the construction of Mount Rushmore National Monument, the South Dakota Badlands, the Lakota prophet Black Elk, and the Native American survivors of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Groethe’s pictures are housed and displayed at the Rapid City Airport, the Smithsonian Institution, Mount Rushmore, Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument Visitor Center, a theme park in Imachi City,Japan, and many other museums and private collections.
Steve Babbitt is an artist, teacher and commercial photographer specializing in architectural and industrial photography. My art primarily focuses on the abstract quality of thenatural world and the awkward and humorous way man and nature coexist. Babbitt was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay area. He studied at the San Fran- cisco ArtInstitute where I earned both a BFA and MFA in photography. Babbitt has been teaching photography at the university level for over 25 years. His photographs can be found in the permanent collections of The Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, the Getty Museum Library, the San Francisco Art Institute, Yosemite National Park, South Dakota Art Museum.and the Dahl Art Center.
Learning Forums are wide-ranging, thought-provoking presentations. Each program features a forty-five minute presentation, followed by an open forum with questions and discussion about the topic.
Admission is $12 for adults, $10 for seniors, half-off for members & free for students with a paid adult/senior admission (includes museum admission).
