“Making a Shelter” illuminates the black experience in the south during the Great Depression – Huge
Between 1935 and 1944, the Farm Safety Administration (FSA) stimulated a unique documentary project. As Franklin D., the global economic crisis spanned 1929-1939, was complicated by the Dust Bowl in North America, which was exacerbated by severe droughts due to agricultural customs and strong winds. Many farmers and their families were forced to migrate because in some cases their livelihoods were essentially blown away.
FSA information head Roy E. Vachon and Carl Mydans et al.
Initially, the project focused on recording cash loans provided to individual farmers, visually documenting good deeds, and suburban development plans. The second phase took a more ambitious approach by sending photographers to rural southern areas, focusing on the life experiences of Sharecroppers and migrant workers in the West and the Midwest, as well as immigrant workers in the Midwest. Later, the project expanded to include rural and urban documents as well as World War II.
Arguably the most iconic image captured by FSA photographers during this period was Dorothea Lange’s 1936 portrait, commonly known as “Immigration Mother,” which portrays a picky pea family in California. But Stryker chose the final published image from tens of thousands of negative angles overall, focusing on a relatively narrow horizon of life over this time, a mostly white struggle.
For Dr. Tamir Williams, curatorial assistant at the Art Bridges Foundation, this omission is “how Black Southerners have broadly created spaces of resilience, shelter and identity in economic hardship and systemic oppression.” Amazing black and white images bring us back to almost imagined times, if not for the daily records of life captured through the eyes of Rothstein, Evans, Lee, and others.
In the collaboration between the Bridge of Art and the Museum of Art, A new exhibition called Making a shelter: Black Great Black Space
Depression South Around the Great Depression, over thirty images seen from the FSA archives rarely saw black space. Photos of houses, churches, schools and barber shops show “how internal and public gathering spaces become canvases for self-determination and cultural conservation.”
Images in the exhibition focus on the lives of the Southern United States, especially the sharing people. Tenant farmers of lands belonging to others (paying rent in crops instead of cash) are often bound by a cycle of debt, thanks to high interest rates and unfair contractual clauses, which make it difficult to interrupt, let alone succeed. To landowners, many sharers have experienced a system that essentially extends certain conditions of slavery.
From the shadows of the Mississippi Delta porch to the Atlanta barber shop to the hearth of plantation tenants, FSA photographers capture candid, tender everyday scenes that highlight the living and working conditions of black workers in the 1930s and early 1940s.
These titles are often written in description form, taking out dated terms, but there is a glimpse of specific locations, such as Gasburn, Atlanta and elsewhere throughout the depths. Black people are still forced to endure the practices of the Jim Crow era, and blacks attend quarantined churches, barber shops and other businesses. Making a shelter Revealing these historically underrepresented areas.
“The space captured in these photos is not only a shelter, but a shelter,” Williams said. “They talked about how Black Southerners create places of refuge, affirmation and self-determination, even in the harshest circumstances. This exhibition attempts to change the way we see the Great Depression as a largely white tragedy and expands it to see it affect everyone across the United States.”
Making a shelter Museum of Art in Manhattan, Kansas + May Tour March 9, 2026. Plan your visit on the museum website. You might also like the FSA photographer’s “killing the negatives” or dig deep into images of over 170,000 FSAs in the Library of Congress archives.
