Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Areas of the Black Nice Melancholy South, a brand new exhibition on the Museum of Artwork and Gentle 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 Submit Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Jack Delano throughout six states: Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida, Mississippi, and Missouri.
Offered in partnership with Artwork Bridges Basis, the pictures spotlight the intimacy of life amongst one’s group — personal quarters, public gathering areas — and the care taken to construct one collectively. The exhibition, curator Tamir Williams informed 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.”
Marion Submit Wolcott, “Interior of Negro tenants’ home who have lived on Good Hope Plantation for eight years. Mileston, Mississippi Delta. They have seven children. Mississippi, 1939” (1939/ 2024)
In the course of the summer time of 2023, Ashley Holland, curator and director of Curatorial Initiatives for the Artwork Bridges Basis, approached Williams to curate its first in-house touring exhibition, drawing from the FSA pictures assortment. On 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 properties constructed by each White and Black laborers, notably in La Forge, Missouri. Inquisitive about “what home and homemaking might have looked like for other Black persons and families beyond La Forge,” they expanded their analysis.
Russell Lee, “Negroes talking on porch of small store near Jeanerette, Louisiana” (1938/2024), silver gelatin print
Arthur Rothstein, “Home of Negro family. Birmingham, Alabama” (1937/ 2024), silver gelatin print
The exhibition is displayed in tandem with Sanctuary in Movement, a companion set up developed in collaboration with the Yuma Avenue Cultural Middle. Kristy Peterson, vp of Studying, Engagement, and Customer 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 informed 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 by way of 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.
Arthur Rothstein, “Interior of the old Pettway home, now inhabited by John Miller, foreman of the Gees Bend Negroes. Alabama” (1937/ 2024), silver gelatin print
