1910-now: learning resources

A magical landscape

Key points

• Although Yasuo Kuniyoshi immigrated to the United States from Japan when he was 16 years old and considered himself American, discriminatory immigration laws barred him from gaining American citizenship. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Kuniyoshi was not sent to an internment camp, but he was placed under house arrest and questioned by government officials. Like other non-citizen Japanese, Germans, and Italians, he was classed as an “enemy alien.”
• Kuniyoshi was influenced by European modernism, American folk art, and Japanese ink drawings. He combined these influences into his own dreamlike style that blends elements of the familiar and the strange.

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American resilience and the Great Depression

Key points

• Like other government programs created to provide jobs during the Great Depression, the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was started in December 1933 to employ artists like Millard Sheets. After only five months, an exhibition at the Corcoran revealed the program’s success and eventually other federal programs were added to support the arts.
• Millard Sheets depicts the Bunker Hill neighborhood in Los Angeles, including both the formerly-grand mansions and new apartment buildings that housed a crowded community. While Sheets documents their humble living conditions, his sunny painting emphasizes the communal spirit and intimate connections that sustained people during the economic crisis of the 1930s.

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Behind the icon, Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother

Key points

• In this iconic photograph, Dorothea Lange captured the suffering of migrant workers affected by the Dust Bowl and the economic fallout of the Great Depression. Lange highlights the impact of these events on farmers and agricultural laborers, who were less visible than urban unemployed masses.
• With as much as 25% of Americans unemployed during the Great Depression, Roosevelt’s New Deal created a social safety net and spurred economic growth. Lange was commissioned by the Resettlement Administration (which later became the Farm Security Administration) to capture images that would rally support for these new government programs. The immediate success of this photograph brought much-needed assistance to these farm workers.
• Lange’s photograph documents an economic story, but also creates a personal narrative. By closely framing the distant gaze of the woman, surrounded by her children, she encourages our empathy. The photograph is both a factual record and an interpretive work of art.
• Lange’s subject, Florence Owens Thompson, was living in northern California, a destination for many displaced migrant farm workers who were often referred to by the derogatory term, “Okies.” Her story, however, is more complicated since Thompson had been in California for nearly a decade. She was also Cherokee, so her family had most likely been forced to relocate to Oklahoma under the Indian Removal Act of 1830, connecting her to a larger history of American migration and displacement.

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Jacob Lawrence, The Migration Series

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An American story

Key points

• Following the Vietnam War, refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos settled in America. This was often a treacherous journey. The boy in Jamie Wyeth’s painting, Kalounna in Frogtown, was a Laotian immigrant who had relocated to rural Pennsylvania with his family.
• Part of a family of American artists, Jamie Wyeth continues their realistic style, but also incorporates a sense of mystery and tension that is difficult to define. This painting contains a series of contrasts, many of which describe how Kalounna is both integrated into this landscape and set apart from it.

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Hock E Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Native Hosts

Key points

• Through forced relocation and myths of eradication, Native Americans have been marginalized, obscuring the present-day vitality of over 500 federally-recognized tribes with independent sovereignty. Activists, including the artist Edgar Heap of Birds, are working to reveal the ongoing legacy of America’s colonialist past and make the presence of Native Americans visible in our daily lives.
• In a series of signs created specifically for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Edgar Heap of Birds uses language to call the visitor’s attention to the native nations upon whose land they stand. He hopes to shift our perspective on the roles of hosts and visitors, and to conjure a generosity that contrasts with the historical treatment of Native Americans by the government.
• This particular site, in Northwest Arkansas, carries special weight for the artist, as it was part of the Trail of Tears, the route of the forced relocation of 60,000 Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, and Seminole peoples from their ancestral lands to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma).

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