Liminal Identities

Gregorio Prestopino, Green Mountain Village (1936)

Starting in the early 20^th century, anthropologists began to recognize transitional periods in a person’s life as “in-between” stages of social development. Through these studies came the term liminal to define individual transformation. More recent evaluations, however, have argued that the paradigm was rooted in traditional societies, whereas modernity is a realm of permanent liminality: “It happens when a temporary suspension of the normal, everyday, taken for granted state of affairs becomes permanent, generating a loss of reality, even a sense of unreality in daily existence” (Picione, et al. 197). Envision the 1920s, full of euphoria and cultural revelations, suddenly halted by economic falters of the subsequent Great Depression.

Giorgio Prestopino’s Green Mountain Village (1936) stages an uncanny scene, at first glance depicting all the outward signs of a stable community—notably a town hall with its golden dome. But a shopping district in the background is empty; the people shown are older and having little to do, including a woman on a front-porch rocking chair. An incongruous Ford logo points anywhere else besides the sleepy village. Futurity, in the form of a passing baby carriage that draws their attention, has become strange and fragile. Small patches of color push back against an overwhelmingly gray composition.

An ever-changing world can paralyze any person who cannot keep up, leading to a limbo state of identity: suspended from society, liminal in their status and belonging. Art can be entrancing to the mind; it’s easy to start drifting from the current world into images of paint and graphite. Unsure where one fits in the puzzle, art becomes a new puzzle temporarily to fit around that piece. Identity shifts away from reality and into an imagined world filling the canvas, an experience much more profound than “escapism.” It’s almost a ritual, every brush stroke taking the mind and body from one state of being into another within the artwork. The Federal Arts Project was an attempt to create structure for an artist’s life through employment and renewed purpose during hopeless conditions. Yet the artists’ creation of liminal spaces inevitably spoke to viewers of these worlds, inviting them in.