The Bakersfield Museum of Art is hosting the exhibition Hobos to Street People from December 10, 2009 to February 21, 2010. It is an important and a rare thing for museums to address issues of poverty. Here we are in the worst recession since the Depression, and the majority of museums (at least in the San Francisco Bay Area) are doing fashion shows. If art is to have any connection to society, it must demonstrate that connection in exhibitions like this. For the issue of homelessness this is particularly true because the primary reaction to homelessness, is to pretend it doesn’t exist, or to make it disappear by criminalizing it. And here a museum is holding it up and saying, look this is a serious issue that needs to be understood and effectively addressed.
Hobos to Street People is an historical survey. It contrasts the period of the Great Depression with the era of modern homelessness, which began in the early 1980s. There are many parallels between the two periods. If one looks at the homeless encampments along the American River in Sacramento, and in Fresno today one can only be struck by the incredible similarities to the photos of Dorothea Lange. And in the agricultural fields today the workers live in conditions very similar to the Depression era images. But of course there are differences. The people in Dorothea Lange’s photos were primarily economic migrants from the Midwest. Today the agricultural workers are economic migrants from the global south.
The art in this show was created by the artists to make homelessness visible. And they often used their art in different ways to get their message out. The art was used as posters, in magazines, street papers, gallery shows, in books, and in Dorothea Lange’s case as Congressional testimony. And this year several pieces in this show were used as testimony to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Housing who was recently in the US.
Let me give you a few facts to put this in context. During the Depression six thousand Dust Bowl migrants arrived in California each month. In 1933 there were more than one million Americans homeless. Unemployment in 1929 stood at 3% and by 1933, 25% of all workers were unemployed. Those are pretty alarming numbers and today’s numbers aren’t great either.
This year the US Department of Education estimates nearly 1 million children will be homeless. Forty million Americans are living in poverty. This year has shown a 9 to 12% increase in people in shelters. Unemployment is above 10% nationwide. Although the real unemployment figure is closer to 16%. Veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars are moving at faster rates into homelessness than ever before according to the VA. And of course foreclosures are up everywhere. So what has the Federal Governments response been? Over the last four years it has cut all forms of spending on low income housing by two billion dollars, while increasing spending on homeless assistance by 157 million dollars. The message in other words is that it isn’t a system wide failure but simply a failure of individuals. And that is the message driven home again and again. That the problem of homelessness, is a problem of broken individuals.
During the Depression there was a different idea. Artists during the Depression had a sense of the innate nobility of people. They wanted to show that poor people who had lost everything still retained their dignity. So you see again and again, the proud stoic mother in Dorothea Lange’s photos or the determined family in Rockwell Kent’s prints. And the government responded too. The New Deal created programs that assisted artists and gave them opportunities to make this art. But the government also created jobs programs, it addressed the dislocation of farmers from the Midwest and it created agencies to build housing – laying the groundwork for the first federal response to homelessness in US history.
At this time of year charity is on a lot of people’s minds. And charity from individuals is a beautiful thing. But when governments respond to social disasters with charity…when the federal government is giving blankets instead of addressing the problems of inadequate housing, or of homeless children and the needs of returning veterans, then charity is merely a mask and a sham to hide inaction.
This exhibition is evidence of how artists from the Depression era as well as today have used their art to provoke action and to assist in movements towards social justice.
Bakersfield Museum of Art is located at:
1930 R Street
Bakersfield, CA 93301
http://www.bmoa.org/
Tags: 1930s, Affordable Housing, Civil & Human Rights, Depression, exhibition, Hobos, Social Justice Artwork, WRAP Members