Browse Exhibits (26 total)

This is the home page for a series of five digital exhibits that were created during the Spring 2026 academic semester as a partnership between SUNY Geneseo and the Genesee Valley Council on the Arts. Our title suggests that artworks from the 1930s do more than preserve a record of the past; they still shape how viewers look, feel, and make meaning in the present. The paintings and prints remain active because they continue to influence how the world is seen, imagined, and understood. This exhibt provides some background, first by recounting the unusual circumstances that resulted in more than 180 new paintings and prints from the Federal Art Project being transferred to Mount Morris--and that collection's powerful resonance in our own times, nearly a century later. There also is an interactive StoryMap that explores the contingency of the art objects themselves, along with how a geographical location like the Mount Morris Tuberculosis Hospital subtly shapes their meaning.

Direct access to the individual exhibits can be navigated through hyperlinks on this page.

This exhibit explores the representations of rural and urban environments during the 1930s. It draws attention to questions of social mobility and the growing presence of industrialization. In these works, cityscapes depict harsh working conditions as well as emerging communities, whereas rural landscapes offer an apparently serene escape from competitive labor and polluted living spaces. Rural life is depicted as fulfilling; urban life appears challenging and at times lonely. Even if reality did not always reflect those contrasting conditions, New Deal artists often favored the dichotomy, and so this exhibit also invites reflection on the ideas of rural and urban. This exhibit utilizes several aesthetic dichotomies to show how intimately art shaped American visions of the landscape: futurity and pastness; confinement and expanse; collectivity and individualism; contact zones as development or destruction. Even light, color, and tone carried specific associations. Viewed together, these paintings and prints externalize a thematic contrast that reveal what their makers might have been feeling.

Until the mid-twentieth century, tuberculosis was the deadliest disease in human history, and globally it remains the leading cause of death from a single infectious agent. Starting in the late 1880s, sanatoriums were built in rural locations to treat people suffering from the “white death.” Patients moved from cities because fresh air and bed rest were believed to aid the healing process. The rise of treatment accessibility, dubbed the “sanitorium movement,” coincided with the Great Depression. In New York state, three major new facilities were built during the 1930s, including one on Murray Hill in Mount Morris. This exhibit explores the intersection of that medical transformation and the Federal Art Project (FAP), another New Deal program whose paintings were allocated to hospitals and sanatoria—more than 250 to the Mount Morris Tuberculosis Hospital alone. Amidst established perceptions of what was considered healthy, the art of landscapes and everyday life became a window to the outside world, mimicking a sensation of being outside while inspiring hope. It was widely considered effective in managing symptoms and curing patients. But artists didn’t limit themselves only to idealized pictures; they engaged with cultural norms of personal and social health which unfortunately remain relevant in our modern healthcare system. Who gets to heal? 

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.