The canvases of Don Ross are inspired by the works of Edward S. Curtis. A pioneer in photography, Curtis traveled the American West a hundred years ago recording the lives of Native Americans. He photographed their rituals, their aged chiefs, their grandchildren, their mothers and warriors as they stood proudly. But by the late 1850s they were the dying life of a people.

Don Ross is a native of Phoenix but he spent most of his years working in New York City for one of America's largest advertising agencies. Among his accounts were Frito-Lay, Merrill-Lynch. Kodak, IBM, Clairol and Time Magazine. His creative work earned some of the highest awards in advertising such as CLIO and The One Show.

He returned to Phoenix to fulfill a lifelong passion to paint the world of his birth. Beneath the streets and sands of Arizona and New Mexico are the footprints of Hopi, Ajo, Navajo and Mescalero Apache. The footprints of these people are still very much alive as are the footprints of other tribes that cover the American west.

Ross paints only their faces and paints them closely, intimately. He wants you to see them not as a race, not as a people but as a man, a woman, a frightened child, a friend. His paintings are those footprints.