Arthur Rothstein: New Deal America at Kingsborough Art Museum

Via The Brooklyn Rail

May 13, 2025

By Farren Fei Yuan

 In 1935, Arthur Rothstein, freshly graduated from Columbia University, was recruited by his former professor in economics, Roy Stryker, to join the photography unit of the Historical Section, later part of the Farmer Security Administration (FSA) under the New Deal. The Historical Section’s role was to document—and create a history for—the FSA’s work. Faced with the prolonged economic depression, Rothstein quickly took up the offer, not knowing that he would soon author some of the most reproduced images of his time.

This is where New Deal America: Photographs by Arthur Rothstein, on view at Kingsborough Art Museum, begins. Bookended by one of Rothstein’s earliest and most famous “Dust Bowl” pictures (Heavy Black Clouds of Dust Rising over the Texas Panhandle, Texas [1936]) and a deceptively serene scene taken as the U.S. fully entered World War II (Saturday Afternoon in a Prosperous TVA town [1942]), the exhibition surveys what is arguably the most successful period in Rothstein’s career—travelling across the United States on assignment, he photographed rural and suburban communities affected by the Great Depression and the FSA’s efforts toward rehabilitation and resettlement.

Arthur Rothstein, Heavy Black Clouds of Dust Rising over the Texas Panhandle, 1936

The forty-two black-and-white photographs on view have been selected from the Library of Congress collection by the curators, Dr. Ann Rothstein Segan, who is Rothstein’s daughter, and her partner, Brodie Hefner. Presented in chronological sections, the display illustrates a “narrative of recovery and renewal,” as the gallery director Dr. Brian E. Hack writes, one that provokes timely reflection on the role and nature of the federal government. Yet what remains unsaid, though implicit, in the emphatic accumulation of photographic encounters—cemented by the occasional meeting of gazes between the photographer, his subjects, and the viewer—are the questions the exhibition raises about different conceptions of the documentary and the social responsibility of art.    Click for full article