In a landmark institutional collaboration, the Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L) and Art Bridges Foundation present Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South, a new exhibition that reexamines the Farm Security Administration’s iconic photography through a rarely told story: the intimate lives and communal environments of Black Americans in rural Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, and South Carolina just after the Great Depression, during the 1930s and ’40s. The images, commissioned by the FSA, were taken by photographers such as Jack Delano, Walker Evans Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Marion Post Wolcott, and others.
In 1935, Roy E. Stryker, head of the FSA’s Information Division, recruited a group of photographers to undertake an ambitious project: to create a massive photo documentation of the living conditions of agricultural workers in the rural American South. With their photo equipment, rolls of film, and travel itineraries in hand, each photographer set out to capture honest scenes of everyday life for these Southern Americans who felt the devastating economic effects of The Great Depression. These rarely circulated photos captured over the project’s roughly nine-year span paint a nuanced picture of the Great Depression-era American South; the photos that Stryker later selected for mass public circulation offered a very narrow view of these Southern regions and their inhabitants. The exhibition presents a wider alternative than the distributed images, and through photos of homes, churches, schools, and barbershops, the exhibition shows how interior and public gathering spaces became canvases for self-determination and cultural preservation. “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,” says Williams.
Organized by Art Bridges. Curated by Tamir Williams, Curatorial Associate, with support from Ashley Holland, Curator and Director of Curatorial Initiatives, Isabel Ouweleen, Curatorial Research Assistant, and Javier Rivero Ramos, Assistant Curator.
Crafting Sanctuaries: Black Spaces of the Great Depression South
Until March 9, 2026
Museum of Art + Light (MoA+L)
316 Pierre Street
Manhattan, KS 66502
www.artlightmuseum.org
