Southern Tenant Farmers Museum offers photographic exhibit, special presentation, May 21

May 7, 2009 -- The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, 117 Main Street, Tyronza, is currently hosting Marjorie J. Hunter’s exhibit “Hope and Despair: FSA Photography in Arkansas during the Great Depression,” beginning Tuesday, May 5 and running through June 30. Due to the immense popularity of this exhibit, its run has been extended through Wednesday, July 22. On Thursday, May 21, at 7 p.m., the museum will present a special presentation by Marjorie J. Hunter, a history teacher at West Memphis High School and a student in the Heritage Studies PhD program at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. Admission is free, the public is welcome, and refreshments will be provided.

“Hope and Despair” is a collection of more than 30 rarely viewed Farm Service Administration photographs taken in Arkansas by such noted photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Edwin Locke, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. The photos illustrate more than the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression; they also illustrate the indomitable endurance of individuals in eastern Arkansas. Hunter developed the project under the direction of Dr. Clyde Milner II, Heritage Studies program director, and she selected and compiled the photographs from the Library of Congress archives.

The exhibition’s images include sharecroppers near Blytheville, children chopping cotton in Marked Tree, and people in the Forrest City refugee camp. The pictures have the original captions describing the activity, place, or date the photograph was made. The starkness of the photographs and the lack of specific details encourage viewers to formulate their own interpretations of these historic works.

“One reason I chose this group of photographs was to examine how these families developed a sense of reliance on the community during hard times,” Hunter explained. “My PhD dissertation in Heritage Studies focuses specifically on the women’s networks that provided shared information and emotional support to survive the Depression. These public-domain photographs allow us a glimpse into these forgotten lives.”

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was initially created as the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal projects. The FSA attempted to combat rural poverty in America. The photography project initially documented the RA’s cash loans to individual farmers and the agency’s construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage of the project focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and of migratory agricultural workers in the Midwest and the West. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States.

To convince the general public of the need for the agency’s mission, Roosevelt appointee and head of the FSA, Rexford Tugwell appointed Roy Stryker as “Chief of the Historical Section,” with the assignment of photographing the devastated land and people that were the agency’s task to rescue. Under Stryker’s direction, the Information Division adopted a goal of “introducing America to Americans.” His camera crew took thousands of pictures, and members of the team, such as Lange, Evans, Rothstein, and Shahn, gained reputations as leading creators of documentary photography.

“The photographs depict a wide range of emotion from hopefulness in the eyes of a child to despair carved in the faces of the adults,” Hunter said. “All of them show abject poverty and the desperation found in being a sharecropper during the Great Depression.”

The Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, one of ASU-Jonesboro’s Heritage SITES (System Initiatives for Technical and Educational Support), is located in the historic Mitchell-East Building at 117 Main Street, Tyronza. The museum’s mission is to enhance knowledge and understanding of tenant farming and agricultural labor movements in the Mississippi River Delta. The museum seeks to preserve the history and promote the legacy of sharecropping, tenant farming, and the farm labor movement. Museum hours are 9 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Monday-Friday, and 12 noon-3 p.m. on Saturday. Admission to the museum is free.

For more information about the “Hope and Despair” exhibition, or other special events at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum, contact Linda Hinton, assistant director, at (870) 487-2909, or e-mail stfm@ritternet.com.
 

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Photographs, from top:
Marjorie Hunter, creator of "Hope and Despair: FSA Photography in Arkansas during the Great Depression."
Dorothea Lange's "Negro Women," Earle, Arkansas, is one of the images featured in "Hope and Despair."
Arthur Rothstein's "Sharecropper," Wilson Plantation, Wilson, Arkansas, is another of the FSA images on display at the Southern Tenant Farmers Museum through June 30.