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Parkin Archeological State Park to Host Hope and Despair Exhibit
Sep 21, 2010

Parkin Archeological State Park will host Marjorie J. Hunter’s exhibit “Hope and Despair: FSA Photography in Arkansas during the Great Depression,” beginning Monday, September 20. The exhibit will be displayed through December 31. On Tuesday, October12, the park will present a special presentation by Hunter, a history teacher at West Memphis High School and a student in the Heritage Studies PhD program at Arkansas State University-Jonesboro. The lecture begins at 7 p.m. Admission is free, the public is welcome, and refreshments will be provided.

“Hope and Despair” is a collection of more than 30 rarely viewed Farm Service Administration photographs taken in Arkansas by such noted photographers as Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, Edwin Locke, Carl Mydans, Arthur Rothstein, Ben Shahn, and Marion Post Wolcott. The photos illustrate more than the poverty and desperation of the Great Depression; they also illustrate the indomitable endurance of individuals in eastern Arkansas. Hunter developed the project under the direction of Dr. Clyde Milner II, Heritage Studies program director, and she selected and compiled the photographs from the Library of Congress archives.

The exhibition’s images include sharecroppers near Blytheville, children chopping cotton in Marked Tree, and people in the Forrest City flood refugee camp. The pictures have the original captions describing the activity, place, or date the photograph was made. The starkness of the photographs and the lack of specific details encourage viewers to formulate their own interpretations of these historic works.

“One reason I chose this group of photographs was to examine how these families developed a sense of reliance on the community during hard times,” Hunter explained. “My PhD dissertation in Heritage Studies focuses specifically on the women’s networks that provided shared information and emotional support to survive the Depression. These public-domain photographs allow us a glimpse into these forgotten lives.”

The Farm Security Administration (FSA) was initially created as the Resettlement Administration (RA) in 1935 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal projects. The FSA attempted to combat rural poverty in America. The photography project initially documented the RA’s cash loans to individual farmers and the agency’s construction of planned suburban communities. The second stage of the project focused on the lives of sharecroppers in the South and of migratory agricultural workers in the Midwest and the West. As the scope of the project expanded, the photographers turned to recording rural and urban conditions throughout the United States.

To convince the general public of the need for the agency’s mission, Roosevelt appointee and head of the FSA, Rexford Tugwell appointed Roy Stryker as “Chief of the Historical Section,” with the assignment of photographing the devastated land and people that were the agency’s task to rescue. Under Stryker’s direction, the Information Division adopted a goal of “introducing America to Americans.” His camera crew took thousands of pictures, and members of the team, such as Lange, Evans, Rothstein, and Shahn, gained reputations as leading creators of documentary photography.

“The photographs depict a wide range of emotion from hopefulness in the eyes of a child to despair carved in the faces of the adults,” Hunter said. “All of them show abject poverty and the desperation found in being a sharecropper during the Great Depression.”

Parkin Archeologcal State Park preserves and interprets the Parkin archeological site on the St. Francis River where a 17-acre Mississippi Period American Indian village was located from A.D. 1000 to 1550, as well as the 20th century Sawdust Hill community, a timber camp community located at the same site.  Parkin Archeological State Park exists to preserve, collect, research and interpret the site and its associated American Indian culture emphasizing the period of A.D. 1200-1600, its interaction with the first Europeans, and the impact of historic utilization of the site area.. Museum hours are 8:00 a.m.-5:00 p.m., Monday-Saturday, and 1:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m. on Sunday. Admission to the museum is $3.00 for adults and children over the age of 12 and $2.00 for children ages 6-12.  A $10.00 family pass for parents and children under the age of 18 is also available.

For more information about the “Hope and Despair” exhibition, or other special events at the Parkin Archeological State Park, call (870) 755-2500, or email the park at parkin@arkansas.gov.

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