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In Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian (2006), directed by Shawn Levy, the film's protagonist, Larry Daley, grabs the pitchfork from Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930) and uses it as a weapon in the real world as if asking: Does art simply depict another world, or can it also function as a threshold between worlds? The film's viewer, deeply immersed in its story, hardly needs convincing that art blurs the line between reality and imagination.
Our exhibit focuses upon visual artworks created during the Great Depression, thresholds variously reflecting moments of uncertainty, hope, and change. Figures can be seen standing at the frame’s edges, moving between spaces, or appearing caught between past and future. Appreciated as liminal scenes, paintings invite us to imagine what lies beyond the world we can see. They were interactive long before digital media and link the earlier artform to other kinds of media, including video games, the performing arts, and board games such as The Game of Life. Invented in 1860 by Milton Bradley, that game has invited players to inhabit an imagined life inside the tabletop world. In different ways, all of these examples rely on immersion to locate participants within a particular perspective and encourage active engagement with structured environments.
Look at Ruth Harper's 1941 painting The Wizard of Oz: a central figure, perhaps meant to be Dorothy Gale, stands in a vibrant theatrical space. Seen from behind, the figure leads a viewer’s gaze into the scene, where an emerald castle floats in the distance. Characters from across the Oz series appear together in a unified space, forming a World rather than any particular scene. Harper's painting is less familiar than Victor Fleming's 1939 film adaptation, but both must have resonated powerfully to their Depression-era viewers--and they still do. As you navigate between your world and those of the artworks exhibited here, consider what it means to step beyond the familiar and what you might discover on the other side.
Credits: Emma Derrell, Gwenyth Harrington, Ariana Harris, Sophia Kitchens, Florence Pallotta, Ava White.