Uncovering the Overlooked Histories of the Great Depression
When the United States Department of Agriculture established the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in 1937, hoping to provide aid to rural communities affected by the Great Depression, it also implemented a photography project headed by government official Roy Stryker. The photographs were meant to generate support for the agency, allowing the public to witness the impacts of the Depression for themselves. Made by recruited photographers and then selected by Stryker for inclusion in traveling exhibitions and news outlets, the chosen images overwhelmingly depicted White families — a narrow and literally whitewashed view of rural America.
Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Black Great Depression South, a new exhibition at the Museum of Art and Light in Manhattan, Kansas, showcases a broader view of FSA imagery, focusing on Black Southerners documented by photographers like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Jack Delano across six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Missouri.
Presented in partnership with Art Bridges Foundation, the photos highlight the intimacy of life among one’s community — private quarters, public gathering spaces — and the care taken to build one together. The exhibition, curator Tamir Williams told 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 of 2023, Ashley Holland, curator and director of Curatorial Initiatives for the Art Bridges Foundation, approached Williams to curate its first in-house traveling exhibition, drawing from the FSA photography collection. At the time, they’d just begun a job there as a curatorial research 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 said. “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 a week at the Library of Congress poring over the digital FSA collection. They were drawn to images of small homes built by both White and Black laborers, particularly 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 research.
The exhibition’s photographs are reverent, offering glimpses into otherwise unseen instances of Black domesticity and community. “I find Jack Delano’s ‘Negro tenant family near Greensboro, Alabama’ (1941) to be incredibly striking,” shared Javier Rivero Ramos, associate curator at Art Bridges. In the image, a young family poses in their home, the walls and ceilings plastered and reinforced with newspaper clippings, a kitten at their feet. “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 associate, said 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 installation developed in collaboration with the Yuma Street Cultural Center. Kristy Peterson, vice president of Learning, Engagement, and Visitor Experiences at the museum, pointed to the history of the site.
“Manhattan, Kansas, has a rich history as a town site established by abolitionist settlers, circa 1855,” Peterson told 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 through next spring, is both 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 said.