New Exhibit Opening and Panel Discussion
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: CONTACT: Susan Talbot-Stanaway, Director
December 2, 2011 phone 740-452-0741 or susan@zanesvilleart.org
ZANESVILLE MUSEUM OF ART ANNOUNCES EXHIBITION OPENING AND PANEL DISCUSSION
The Zanesville Museum of Art announces the public opening of the special exhibition, Images of the Great Depression: A Documentary Portrait of Ohio, 1935-2010, on Saturday, December 10, 1:30-4 p.m.
At 1:30 p.m. there will be a panel discussion introducing the exhibition and its objectives. Presenters for the panel discussion will be Columbus photographers Ardine Nelson and Fredrik Marsh, and Patricia Williamsen, Executive Director, Ohio Humanities Council, Nelson and Marsh were part of the re-photography team commissioned by the Ohio Humanities Council to revisit the site of New Deal photographs. A reception with refreshments will follow the panel discussion.
Through a grant award from the Ohio Humanities Council, the exhibition, panel discussion, and reception will be free and open to the public.
The special exhibition, Images of the Great Depression: A Documentary Portrait of Ohio, features photographs made by Farm Security Administration, Civilian Conservation Corps, and Works Projects Administration artists during the 1930s and images of those same sites today. The exhibition is part of a larger Ohio Humanities Council project to help Ohioans explore the legacy of the Great Depression and the New Deal. The exhibition was curated by Andrew Hershberger, Bowling Green State University, and Patricia Williamsen, Executive Director, Ohio Humanities Council.
Beginning with the stock market crash in 1929, the decade of the Great Depression introduced an era of unprecedented change in American communities. As families struggled to stay together and local government struggled to care for their communities, Roosevelt’s New Deal brought sweeping changes to the landscape of Ohio and to expectations for a better life.
It was also an era in which documentary photography influenced how Americans thought and felt about themselves, their communities, and their hopes for the future. Roosevelt and his New Deal Administrators understood the power of photography to influence public opinion, federal legislation, and the nation’s recovery. The Farm Security Administration (FSA), which later fed into the Office of War Information (OWI,) sent professional photographers such as Arthur Rothstein, Carl Mydans, John Vachon, and Ben Shahn to document rural and small town life and the effects of the Great Depression.
In 2009, the Ohio Humanities Council commissioned a rephotographic survey of Ohio sites photographed by FDR’s documentarians in the 1930s. The rephotographic survey was undertaken by a team of award-winning photographers: Ardine Nelson, Ohio State University; Fredrik Marsh; Sean Hughes, University of Cincinnati; Helen Hoffelt, Columbus College of Art & Design; Joel Whitaker, University of Dayton; Lynn Whitney, Bowling Green State University. The communities they visited for rephotographic work included Buckeye Lake, Cincinnati, Circleville, Columbus, Greenhills, Lancaster, Newark, Plain City, Somerset, Waterville, and Urbana.
Ardine Nelson is a professor in the Department of Art's Photography program at Ohio State University and is the recipient of Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Art Council, and John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowships. Fredrik Marsh teaches in the Art Department at the Ohio State University and has received Fellowships from the Ohio Arts Council, Greater Columbus Arts Council, State of Saxony (Germany) Ministry of Science and Art and a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.
Two new installations complement the exhibition. These are a selection of 1930s photographs of Zanesville by Dr. Harry W. Taylor and a group of Federal Art Project ceramic sculptures made in Cleveland in the 1930s. The rare ceramics are on loan from a private collection.
Images of the Great Depression and the new installations will be on view at the Zanesville Museum of Art from December 10, 2011 – February 18, 2012.
Images of the Great Depression: A Documentary Portrait of Ohio was funded by grants from the We the People initiative at the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Ohio Arts Council, the Thomas R. Schiff Fund at the Greater Cincinnati Foundation, and Epson America, Inc.
The Ohio Humanities Council, a state-based partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities, supports public programs to help Ohioans connect what they learn with the way they live. For more information, visit the Ohio Humanities Council at www.ohiohumanities.org.