Browse Exhibits (20 total)

This exhibit is based upon an 1892 bird's eye panorama created by Burleigh Litho of Troy, NY. From an overhead viewpoint of perhaps 1,500 feet—a location that wasn’t accessible in this era before airplanes—we look down upon a somewhat simplified and idealized portrait of Caledonia. Below the illustrated map, its legend provides us with a snapshot of the village recovering from a major fire in 1891. Forty-eight numbered points included railroad stations, churches, the public school, and even Seth Green’s fish hatchery in nearby Mumford. The majority of named locations, however, were commercial enterprises serving as a likely base of customers to purchase copies of the completed map: if you subscribed, your business became a location. This exhibit includes a section about the 1891 fire and its consequences; one upon panoramic maps, and the Burleigh Litho company in particular; a tour of the bird's eye map; a section offering more detailed information about most of the individual businesses; and a gallery of similar maps from western New York. Together, they show Caledonia rebuilding itself at the century’s turn using the swiftly evolving medium of advertising and its imagined worlds, an appropriate counterpart to this idealized village as seen from the clouds above.

The origins of the Geneseo Migrant Center (GMC) date to the mid-1960s, and during much of the following fifty years it advocated for agricultural workers whose residency in the Genesee Valley was seasonal. As historian Cindy Hahamovitch bluntly explains, beginning in the late 19^th century “farm owners relied on men, women, and children who would appear in time for the harvest and disappear thereafter.” One thing has been consistent through the years, though: an often tense relationship between farmers and a class of people earlier known as hands, hired help, laborers, boys, gangs, hirelings, Irishmen, and other now-forgotten terms. How similar were those earlier lives to the experiences of migrant workers during the last half century?

This exhibit revisits the history of hired agricultural labor in the Genesee Valley. It’s incredibly difficult to find any direct testimony of farmworkers on their own behalf—that was one of the most powerful achievements of the Migrant Center—and the same was true during the 19^th century, as well. Farmers “so much occupied with their needful labor” felt trapped between volatile national commodities markets, and managing what one writer dismissed as the “careless or incompetent hands” in their fields. Using a digitized archive of The Genesee Farmer between 1840-65, we developed a body of writing relevant to our subject, albeit mostly authored by farmers.

When it wasn’t being rendered invisible, the tendency was to simplify migrant labor...as if the hands picking potatoes weren't doing anything else. The five sections of “Needful Labor” therefore acknowledge hired farmworkers through concentric perspectives that aren’t mutually exclusive: 1) the agricultural work they performed; 2) their material and social lives on the farm; 3) their relations to farmers and landholders; 4) the impacts of economic and social changes; and 5) their embeddedness in ecosystems, both on and beyond the farm. To borrow a metaphor from permaculture theorist Bill Mollison, it is a kind of stacking to discern different levels of American agriculture.

Under the Federal Arts program, the main goal was not only to fund artists who created paintings but also to allocate that art to public places such as government buildings, schools, or hospitals. The Tuberculosis Sanatorium in Mt. Morris was one such location where paintings from a variety of locations were allocated—to the best of our knowledge, originating in New York City and Woodstock, NY. This exhibit takes the additional step of looking at these paintings in terms of where they originated, and the importance of that social space during the 1930s. The New Deal Gallery paintings evoke stability and nostalgia (if only for a moment) but also a sometimes-ecological recognition of the land that America has to offer. That couldn't be taken for granted during the 1930s, and it's hard to see how we could ignore those lessons today. Update Jan. 2020: a portion of this exhibit was recognized by Esri as a finalist for the "2019 StoryMapper of the Year" contest.

This exhibit uses the New Deal Gallery collection as a case study for at least three ways of thinking about conservation: as an issue concerning art museums and archives generally; as an urgent environmental issue, specifically during the 1930s; and as an ethical issue encompassing those first two discourses along with many others. What does our culture choose to conserve? What choices have led to conditions of neglect? The New Deal era offered blunt assessments of unsustainable practices because it had no other choice; it created innovative conservation practices we have forgotten and need to remember quickly. Caretaking ignores false categories, and the pages of this exhibit approach the New Deal Gallery itself as one such site of neglect and conservation.

The disastrous combination of industrialization and anthropogenic climate change that inspired the Green New Deal exhibits has transformed so many environments and homes to the point of unfamiliarity, eliciting a sense of sorrow and wistfulness at the negatively transformed space from the loss of one’s place of solace. This melancholy is similar to that of nostalgia but for a word rooted in the meaning “to return home,” it is not applicable for those who are already “home.” Thus, Glenn Albrecht aptly names this emotion “solastalgia,” based off the ideas of solace and desolation: “Solace has meanings connected to the alleviation of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events. Desolation has meanings connected to abandonment and loneliness. The suffix -algia has connotations of pain or suffering...Solastalgia, simply put, is ‘the homesickness you have when you are still at home.’”