Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South expands the popular visual memory of the Great Depression by highlighting rarely seen Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of rural Black Southerners and their spatial worlds. We ask Dr. Tamir Williams, curatorial research assistant at Art Bridges, to tell us more about what led to the creation of this traveling exhibition, on view now at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design.

What question or idea guided your curatorial approach?

When I was asked to curate the Art Bridges Foundation’s the first in-house traveling exhibition, I was only given the parameters of drawing from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography collection. So, I began by researching previous exhibitions and scholarship on FSA photography. Notably, I came across Nicholas Natanson’s The Black Image in the New Deal: The Politics of FSA Photography and Sarah Boxer’s “Whitewashing the Great Depression” article that was featured in the Atlantic. After reading those texts, I knew that I wanted to focus on this issue of the absence of Black and other non-white persons from the larger/popular visual memory of the Great Depression. I specifically wanted to explore how/why this exclusion/ “misremembering” happened and how it could be redressed.

What surprised you most during the curatorial process?

I was most surprised to uncover the series of photographs that grounds this exhibition. When I began the curatorial process for Crafting Sanctuaries, I spent roughly two weeks slowly looking through the digitized FSA photo collection at the Library of Congress. I eventually came across a series of photographs by Russell Lee whose titles all included the descriptor “Southeast Missouri Farms. La Forge project, Missouri.” This series depicted the construction of small homes by both white and Black laborers, as well as intimate glimpses into the dwellings of white and Black sharecropper families. I did further research and learned that the federal government created the “La Forge Farms project” in Southeast Missouri as part of its New Deal programs for rural farmers: the government brought 6,700 acres of land in La Forge, Missouri that was already occupied by 100 sharecropper families (60 white families and 40 Black families). The project included an initiative called “Building 100 homes in 100 days” which sought to rehouse those 100 families into either newly built or rehabilitated houses on the land.

I subsequently became curious about this notion of “home”–specifically what “home(-making)” meant for Black persons/families both in La Forge and in other Southern states. Thus, this exhibition offers 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) in the country. Most of the well-known images that show the effects of the Great Depression in the U.S. South mainly depict the dwellings of white persons/families. This exhibition expands that visual narrative, while also re-shining light on some forgotten stories from this period, like the La Forge Farms project.

“What is one photograph in the exhibition that you particularly connect with?

I’m particularly drawn to the person holding the lamp in their hand as the truck carries them and their belongings to their new residence. The way in which they tightly clasp the lamp seems to reflect the care that went into deciding what they would bring into their new domestic world.

Curator Talk, Reflections on Crafting Sanctuaries

August 25, 5:30-7 p.m.
Gregg Museum Lobby

Join us to learn more about the special exhibition Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South with the curator Dr. Tamir Williams. Crafting Sanctuaries expands the popular visual memory of the Great Depression by highlighting rarely seen Farm Security Administration (FSA) images of rural Black Southerners and their spatial worlds during the 1930s and 1940s.

Collaborative Curatorial Team

Organized by Art Bridges Foundation, and curated by Tamir Williams, PhD, with support from Ibby Ouweleen, Curatorial Research Assistant, and Javier Rivero Ramos, PhD, Associate Curator. The Gregg Museum’s collection connections were developed in collaboration with Meredith Osborne, Curatorial Assistant, Sara Segerlin, Museum Director, and Collections Intern Julia Hill.