January Issue 2000
Photography Exhibits Featured in Spartanburg, SC
The Spartanburg County Museum of Art in Spartanburg, SC is excited to exhibit A Century of Photography on view Jan. 11 - Feb. 27. The Museum celebrates the approach of the new millennium by providing three exhibits that highlight the vast changes in the South during the 20th century.
Visitors Views: Dorothea Lange and Other Farm Security Administration Photographers in South Carolina will be on display in the Parsons Gallery. Capturing the faces of share-croppers, tenant farmers, relocated families, and the cities and rural regions that embraced and spurned them. From 1935 until 1942 forty-four photographers traveled the US documenting the nations rural recovery efforts brought on by the Depression. Of those, five were given assignments in SC. This exhibit, from the permanent collection of the SC State Museum, presents the visions from Walker Evans, Jack Delano, Dorothea Lange, and Marion Post Walcott from this period of triumph and despair.
In 1935 Franklin D. Roosevelt, in an effort to address the serious issues of rural poverty that resulted from the Depression, created the Farm Security Administration (FSA). The Agency, an arm of the Department of Agriculture, had an agenda to reduce farm tenancy and preserve individual family ownership of farms. Its efforts were threefold: tenant purchase programs, rural rehabilitation, and community resettlement. The director, aware of the importance of public relations, created the Historical Section, which built a file of photographic evidence of the nations agricultural conditions. In the process it allowed a group of the nation's finest photographers to hone their skills and the art of documentary photography.
Experience the images that offer a view into the rural realities that existed in SC during the years that followed the depression. The exhibit was made available through the SC State Museum's Traveling Exhibits Program.
In the Parsons Gallery, Southern Faces: The Photojournalism of Bruce Roberts, is an exhibition of photographs from 1956-1978 by one of the leading documentary photographers in the South. Bruce Roberts' photographs have appeared frequently in magazines such as Life, Look, Sports Illustrated, and Time. They document the impact of the Civil Rights movement and President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society Program in Appalachia and other areas in the upper South. Featuring 50 black and white photographs, the exhibit includes photographs of a sit-in demonstration at a Woolworths lunch counter in Charlotte, NC in 1960; a Ku Klux Klan meeting near Salisbury, NC in 1965; a tent revival in Birmingham, AL in 1967; women workers in a tobacco shed near Lumberton, NC in 1970; and of teenagers waiting eagerly for Elvis Presley to appear at a National Guard Armory in Tampa, FL in 1956. The exhibition also includes candid photographs of Lyndon Johnson, George Wallace, Billy Graham, Roy Wilkins, Sam Ervin, and John F. Kennedy.
Roberts, who currently lives in NC, is a native of NY, where he worked for The New York Daily News. In 1958, he moved to NC and joined the staff of the Charlotte Observer, where he pioneered the use of small 35mm cameras and natural light photography. From 1978 to 1982, Roberts was Director of Photography for Southern Living magazine.
Twice named Southern Photographer of the Year,
Roberts also won two gold medals from the NC Arts Council. His
photographs have been included in the World Exhibition of Photography
at the Museum of the Hague in the Netherlands in 1965 and 1977.
Others have traveled world wide in the acclaimed Family of
Children exhibition for the Museum of Modern Art. He has also
photographed and or coauthored numerous books.
The exhibition was produced by The University of Texas Center
for American History.
Photographic Highlights from Seeing Spartanburg: a History in Images will be on display in the Burwell Gallery. Seeing Spartanburg was written by Dr. Philip N. Racine, a Professor of History at Wofford College and author of numerous books and articles about Southern history. Seeing Spartanburg traces Spartanburg's history from its beginnings during the Colonial period, through the growth years of the early twentieth century and the hard days of war and depression, to the dynamic growth of the present era. The Museum will highlight the changes in Spartanburg during the twentieth century. Twenty works will be on loan from the Spartanburg County Library's Willis Collection. Other images are on loan from a variety of sources such as Spartan Communications Corporation, National Archives, Converse College, and family albums.
For more info check our SC Institutional Gallery
listings or call 864/582-7616.
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