“Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South”
August 6, 2026 to January 16, 2027
Image above: Arthur Rothstein (1915-1985) Home of Negro family. Birmingham, Alabama, 1935, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b35701.
What Makes a Sanctuary?
Organized by Art Bridges Foundation, Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design features historical photographs that offer a glimpse into how rural Black Southerners constructed places of respite and belonging within their homes and communal spaces amid the economic hardship and racial violence of the Great Depression, an unprecedented economic crisis that impacted the United States of America during the late 1920s and 1930s. Inspired by Crafting Sanctuaries, the Gregg Museum additionally features connections within its permanent collection that illuminate North Carolina stories.
“Crafting Sanctuaries seeks to paint a much more truthful and diverse visual narrative of rural Southern America during the challenging years of the Great Depression by reexamining the photo archives of the Farmer Security Administration.”
– Tamir Williams, PhD
Curatorial Research Assistant at Art Bridges
The Farm Security Administration (FSA), a US governmental agency created to assist impoverished agricultural workers during this economic crisis, produced extensive photographic records of the Depression-era rural South. Under the instruction of Roy E. Stryker, head of the Historical Section of the FSA, photographers like Jack Delano, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott documented the everyday lives, struggles, and resilience of Southern Americans. Despite the FSA amassing approximately 175,000 photographs that depicted a diverse range of people and experiences in the South, Stryker mostly selected the images of white Southerners for mass circulation in magazines and newspapers. The photographs of Black Southerners, who lived and persevered through this tumultuous decade in American history, were largely ignored. As a result, the wider American public received a very narrow picture of the Depression-era South and its inhabitants. Crafting Sanctuaries seeks to expand the popular visual memory of the Great Depression by foregrounding FSA images of Black Southerners and their spatial worlds. The photographs in this exhibition highlight the beauty, ingenuity, and creativity that Depression-era Black Americans poured into their domestic and communal spaces in the rural South.
These intimate images reveal the ability of Black Southerners to radically affect the spaces around them and beautifully shape their worlds into sanctuaries. The photographs, curated into six thematic categories — constructing homes, moving homes, Black domestic interiors, liminal spaces, Black communal spaces, and outside spaces — vividly capture the personal meaning and essence that Black Southerners imbued into their farming houses, humble shacks, churches, schoolhouses, and barbershops. The exhibition reveals how Black Southerners during the Great Depression transformed private and public spaces into havens of expression, comfort, and refuge.
Gallery Snapshot
Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South
Marion Post Wolcott (1910–1990), Interior of Negro tenants’ home who have lived on Good Hope Plantation for eight years. Mileston, Mississippi Delta. They have seven children. Mississippi, 1939, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-USF34-052311-D.
Walker Evans (1903–1975), Negro barber shop. Atlanta, Georgia, 1936, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8c52232.
Arthur Rothstein (1915–1985), Interior of the old Pettway home, now inhabited by John Miller, foreman of the Gees Bend Negroes. Alabama, 1937, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8b35948.
“Ben Shahn” (1898–1969), “Scene in Natchez, Mississippi,” 1935, printed 2024, silver gelatin print, 8 x 10 in. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection, LC-DIG-fsa-8a16407.
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.
