Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South

Between 1935 and 1944, a group of photographers working for the Farm Security Administration created a massive photo-documentation portrait of the living conditions of American agricultural workers in the rural South. The images that were selected for mass publication, many of which have become icons of this period of American history, offered a narrow view of these Southern regions and their inhabitants. Spanning the work of Russell Lee, Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, and Ben Shahn; and six Southern states (Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Florida Mississippi, and Missouri), this exhibition foregrounds photos of private dwellings and public gathering spaces of Black Southerners. Crafting Sanctuaries reveals how these Depression-era Black Southerners worked to construct and reflect a sense of home and self by imagining, designing, and adorning their interior worlds and communal spaces. Farming houses, humble shacks, churches, schoolhouses, and barbershops are refashioned into havens of expression, comfort, and refuge.