Reclaiming a Whitewashed Historical past of the Great Depression 

When the United States Department of Agriculture established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, hoping to supply assist to rural communities affected by the Great Depression, it additionally carried out a pictures undertaking headed by authorities official Roy Stryker. The pictures had been meant to generate assist for the company, permitting the general public to witness the impacts of the Depression for themselves. Made by recruited photographers after which chosen by Stryker for inclusion in touring exhibitions and information retailers, the chosen photographs overwhelmingly depicted White households — a slender and actually whitewashed view of rural America.

Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Black Great Depression South, a brand new exhibition on the Museum of Art and Light in Manhattan, Kansas, showcases a broader view of FSA imagery, specializing in Black Southerners documented by photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Jack Delano throughout six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Missouri.

Presented in partnership with Art Bridges Foundation, the pictures spotlight the intimacy of life amongst one’s group — non-public quarters, public gathering areas — and the care taken to construct one collectively. The exhibition, curator Tamir Williams advised Hyperallergic, “is an examination of the significance of Black Southerners investing in their spatial worlds — and more largely in beauty — while living through this intense period of economic hardship and racial violence.”

During the summer season of 2023, Ashley Holland, curator and director of Curatorial Initiatives for the Art Bridges Foundation, approached Williams to curate its first in-house touring exhibition, drawing from the FSA pictures assortment. At the time, they’d simply begun a job there as a curatorial analysis assistant.

“I came across Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography (1992) and Sarah Boxer’s ‘Whitewashing the Great Depression’ (2020) for The Atlantic,” Williams mentioned. “I knew that I wanted to focus on this issue of the absence of Black and other non-White persons from the larger visual memory of the Great Depression — and specifically explore how and why this exclusion happened and how it could be redressed.”

Williams spent every week on the Library of Congress poring over the digital FSA assortment. They had been drawn to pictures of small houses constructed by each White and Black laborers, significantly in La Forge, Missouri. Curious about “what home and homemaking might have looked like for other Black persons and families beyond La Forge,” they expanded their analysis.

The exhibition’s pictures are reverent, providing glimpses into in any other case unseen cases of Black domesticity and group. “I find Jack Delano’s ‘Negro tenant family near Greensboro, Alabama’ (1941) to be incredibly striking,” shared Javier Rivero Ramos, affiliate curator at Art Bridges. In the picture, a younger household poses of their house, the partitions and ceilings plastered and bolstered with newspaper clippings, a kitten at their ft. “It seems like every conceivable emotion, thought, and event unfolding through the country is somehow refracted in the image,” Ramos added. Ibby Ouweleen, Art Bridges curatorial affiliate, mentioned she was “taken by Marion Post Wolcott’s interior scene of three children and a dog in their family home, which feels sort of magical and mundane at once.”

The exhibition is displayed in tandem with Sanctuary in Motion, a companion set up developed in collaboration with the Yuma Street Cultural Center. Kristy Peterson, vice chairman of Learning, Engagement, and Visitor Experiences on the museum, pointed to the historical past of the positioning.

“Manhattan, Kansas, has a rich history as a town site established by abolitionist settlers, circa 1855,” Peterson advised Hyperallergic. “Sanctuary in Motion shares information about Manhattan’s history and community, and tells the story of Yuma Street [part of the city’s Historic District] … and its significance as a sanctuary where families made something out of nothing.”

Crafting Sanctuaries, which runs via subsequent spring, is each a corrective and a meditation. “It is my hope that these photographs allow viewers to see and witness how Black Southerners adopted expansive definitions of beauty to craft personal and communal sanctuaries and spaces of respite,” Williams mentioned.