Opening Day

Dorothea Lange’s America

Sunday, May 15 | 12 p.m. – 5 p.m.

View the Museum’s newest exhibition, Dorothea Lange’s America.

The Great Depression was a catalyst for a tremendous outburst of creative energy from America’s photographic community. The devastation wrought upon the country by the Depression inspired a host of socially conscious photographers to capture the many human stories of the time. Dorothea Lange’s America presents these stories with 30 photographs by Dorothea Lange as well as 25 additional works by 11 other photographers working during those troubled times, including Walker Evans, Ben Shawn, Doris Ulmann and Marion Post Wolcott. Each used their cameras and the power of photography to effect positive change.

Pre-eminent among these photographers was Dorothea Lange (1895-1965). Her empathetic images documented the toll that the Depression took on the nation. The evidence was seen in the long lines of desperate, jobless men, migrant workers searching for work, and impoverished families living in squalid conditions. Lange’s photographs made the human cost of the Depression personal by searing these images into America’s consciousness. Her most celebrated photographs of that era – Migrant Mother, White Angel Breadline and Migratory Cotton Picker – have since become icons of the American experience. Organized by Art2Art Circulating Exhibitions, Ann Arbor, MI.