Word: migrant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...also talk to agents in Manhattan eager to package this most mediagenic figure into a brand: big-ticket speeches taped to become one-hour specials; missions to Africa turned into PBS series, to do for the starving masses in the sub-Sahara what Harvest of Shame did for migrant workers...
...goes West; in California, he runs out of America. It is the culmination and extinction of hope. The vision of plenty for everyone becomes a mockery--a process whose impact is amply documented by the 1930s social-realist segments of this show, with their dock strikers and Mexican migrant workers pitted against grasping Anglo bosses. Different cultures and immigrant races swirl around, not in a melting pot as some optimists have supposed but in unappeased opposition to one another...
...however much of a cliche it may have been even at the dawn of the 20th century, there's no doubt about the Edenic promise of California to generation after generation of Americans. To the gold seekers of 1850 no less than to the desperate migrant Okies of the Depression, to the wannabe actress on the bar stool in Schwab's as to the migrant lettuce pickers from Mexico and the Jewish kid getting into the nickelodeon business, California signified hope, plenty, release and transcendence. It was the New World's New World. "That's why I can hardly wait/Come...
...chief emphasis of the exhibition is on California as a place of incessant stress and conflict between groups and interests, as new migrant societies necessarily are. Each of its five sections corresponds to a 20-year slice of history, and tries to set forth (or at least to indicate) the dominant history, the winners' and losers' versions, of the era. It spends at least as much time and space on ephemera, from tourist brochures to labor pamphlets, as on certifiable masterpieces of art--which California has never produced in abundance anyhow...
...portraiture. But it's a highly credible assortment, brainy and fun, with samples from most of the major episodes of 20th century photography. There's a fair selection of greatest hits--Edward Steichen's 1924 portrait of Gloria Swanson behind a scrim of black lace, Dorothea Lange's inevitable Migrant Mother of 1936--and some less familiar examples by big names. Everybody has seen Edward Weston's nudes, but probably not the one here, from 1927, which turns a pair of legs, tightly folded at the knees, into nestled loaves of Italian bread...