本月目标

This month the Museum is excited to be adding to its collection Marion Post’s 1939 photograph titled Star pupil, 82 years old, reading her lesson in adult class, 阿拉巴马州的Gee 's Bend. This vintage print figures a standing Black woman reading aloud amidst a seated group gathered beside her. Post created the image in May 1939 during a trip through the American South sponsored by the Farm Security Administration, a government agency established in 1937 to combat rural poverty during the Great Depression. 这张照片是在吉本德拍摄的, 阿拉巴马州, on lands owned between 1845 and 1895 by the Pettway family, 谁经营一个大棉花种植园. The Pettway’s enslaved more than 100 Black individuals before Emancipation and later employed many of their descendants as sharecroppers. In 1937, the federal government purchased the plantation from an absentee landlord and offered ninety-two Black families the opportunity to rent and later purchase homes there. 除了获得这块土地, the government also helped to underwrite new housing, 日托中心, 还有一所学校.

Post had never previously traveled in the American South. 出生在蒙特克莱尔, 1910年的新泽西, she first worked in photography while studying abroad in Vienna. 在那里她遇到了特鲁德·弗莱希曼, a notable modernist photographer who encouraged her burgeoning interest in the medium. 回到美国, she joined the New York Photo League and worked as a freelancer for several years. 最后，她找到了一份稳定的工作 费城晚间公报, though was discouraged there by being offered fewer opportunities than her male counterparts. 1938年，她遇到了罗伊·史崔克, the head of the photography department at the Farm Security Administration (FSA), who reviewed her portfolio and offered her a job. Post jumped at the opportunity and was soon traveling across the nation creating photographs documenting rural life and the benefits offered by the federal government to these communities. She was the first female photographer to work full-time for the FSA.

Over the next four years, she created more than 9,000 photographs under its auspices. As a young single woman often traveling by herself, Post challenged many social mores of the period. In 1941, she met and married Leon Wolcott, an administrator in the Department of Agriculture. Not long thereafter, she left the FSA, though continued to make photographs for much of her life. The main repository of her work is at the Library of Congress, though her photography has been collected by many American art museums.

In conducting research for this acquisition, we learned that this print was not the first photograph made in Gee’s Bend to enter the Museum’s collection. 2017年，博士. 戴夫D. Frazier presented the Museum with more than a hundred photographs by various American artists from the twentieth century including two works by 阿瑟·Rothstein 另一位FSA摄影师, 也是在Gee 's Bend创作的吗. In 1937, 在波斯特旅行的两年前, Rothstein traveled there to document the community on the occasion of the government’s land purchase. 在图像中 阿拉巴马州的Gee 's Bend, he pictures the poor housing conditions of the community’s Black residents.

Post traveled there two years later with the assignment to depict the community’s progress. She photographed several new buildings that had been built in the previous two years and focused attention on the different activities in which many of its residents were now engaged. Whereas the young woman in Rothstein’s print peers out of a crude window without glass, the older woman in Post’s photograph is actively engaged in a specific educational activity. 看到n together, the two images provide a distinct “before” and “after” view of this community. Such photographs supported the work that the Farm Security Administration was doing at the time.

The addition of Post’s photograph to the Museum’s collection will help to tell a fuller story of this community and the role that the federal government was then playing in aiding Black farmers. Her photograph also points to the new schools and literacy programs established during this period. 

值得注意的, this photograph is titled and affixed to an exhibition mount that includes a label indicating that it was part of the FSA archive. During the years when this agency operated, Stryker often made available works from the archive for special exhibitions. This photograph is a rare example of one of those early exhibition prints.

弗兰克·H. 古德伊尔
皇冠体育艺术博物馆联合馆长