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.”

To read the full article by Monica Uszerowicz, please click here.