High Museum: Depression Art and Photography
Hard times sometimes lead to good art, as evidenced in a new exhibit at Atlanta’s High Museum of Art.
Today’s double-digit unemployment rate and gutted stock prices pale compared to the big D, as in 1929-stock-market-crash Depression.
“American Scenes: Art from the Depression Era in the High Museum Collection,” on display through January 10, 2010, will showcase forty-two works from the High’s permanent collection.
“From the dustbowls of the Midwest to the troubled urban centers, Americans faced devastating loss,” explains Stephanie Heydt, the High’s Margaret and Terry Stent Curator of American Art. “Yet ambitious new skyscrapers began to mark city skylines, and public works ranging from the Hoover Dam to new municipal buildings began to appear across the landscape.”
During the 1930s, when folks weathered a huge collapse of the nation’s financial structure without the internet, artists such as Thomas Hart Benton, John Stuart Curry, and Grant Wood created enduring images. Known as the Regionalist painters, their canvases depict ordinary Americans, down-and-out workers, toiling against and often overcoming devastating conditions.
Photographers like Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange also documented the struggles of those same subjects. A century ago, the WPA and the New Deal – the great-grandfather of today’s stimulus programs -- gave work to unemployed artists to produce civic-minded art projects, from large-scale mural paintings to smaller, more experimental canvases.
Daniel Dixon, Lange’s son, will deliver a lecture on “Women in Photography: Dorothea Lange and Photography as a Universal Language” on Sept. 17 at 7 p.m. Dixon will discuss many of Lange's iconic images as well as her less frequently seen photographs.
The High will also showcase 48 photos in “Look Again: A Selection of Photographs from the Permanent Collection.” Digging through its impressive collection of photographs, the museum investigates “the intersection between reality and fiction within a photograph through images created to challenge the viewer’s expectations.”
Works by Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Man Ray, Lee Friedlander, Frederick Sommer and Aaron Siskind are among the artists who
“have created pictures that challenge the conventional idea that photographs are straightforward purveyors of truth.”
The museum invites viewers to “unravel the complexities behind each image, and encouraged to take the time to "look again."
Danielle Avram, the High's Curatorial Assistant in Photography, will lead a gallery talk on Nov. 5 and Dec. 3 at 7 p.m.
- by Diane Loupe, Atlanta Reporter for HelloMetro
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