When 'The Mona Lisa of the 1930s' came to Yonkers
The gallery at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers hummed last night, at the opening reception for “Modern Women/Modern Vision: Photographs from the Bank of America Collection.”
The exhibit, fresh from Denver on a multi-city national tour, gathers close to 100 images created by more than 40 photographers who happen to be women.
Theirs are names we know. Bold-face names. Trailblazers.
Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange.
It’s only NYC-area stop: Yonkers
The exhibit is a New York metropolitan area exclusive to the Hudson River Museum. If Manhattan’s museum lovers want to see it, they’ve got to come to Yonkers.
Shilpi Chandra, the museum’s assistant curator, was my guide through the bustling gallery, stopping here and there to illuminate the breadth of the collection, which is on loan through the Bank of America Art in Our Communities program through May 10.
“Even though this is a show about women photographers, these women don’t need the qualifier as women,” Chandra said. “They were photographers in their own right, making their own mark, in the same groups as the men, and contributing equally.”
Chandra said women brought a different perspective, in choosing their subjects.
“Women bring a different perspective to life,” she said. “There are definitely scenes that women were capturing that men overlooked because they didn’t think they were interesting.”
It fell to HRM curators to arrange the pieces on their walls, to decide in which order their patrons would experience these works, which are grouped by theme.
Chandra understood the assignment, stopping to introduce me to Berenice Abbott’s luminous “Night View, New York, 1932,” a glimpse of Manhattan from above that glows and, somehow, seems to pulse.
Chandra explained that Abbott had returned to New York from abroad and was stunned by how much the city had changed with the addition of skyscrapers. Next to “Night View” is Abbott’s close-up of the then-new George Washington Bridge. Steps away, Abbott’s view of crisscrossing laundry lines in a claustrophobic tenement.
Masha Turchinksy, director and CEO of the museum, in her exhibit-opening remarks, said: “Berenice Abbott famously said, ‘Photography helps people to see.’ This exhibition reveals the bold ways women have used the medium to claim space, document lives and communities, and challenge conventions, often in the face of discrimination and constraints. Their work continues to inspire and influence new generations.”
Is photography truth?
Chandra said that early photography was considered more truthful, capturing reality.
“It came from a time where you had painting, where if you wanted to capture something, you had to do a sketch. And then came photography which could actually capture something the way it was. Now, we realize photography is a point of view. It’s not a truth anymore. So that’s what we come to when we come the contemporary photographers. It’s all a point-of-view.”
Down the adjoining wall is a series of Margaret Bourke-White photographs taken in the Soviet Union, when she was the first Western photographer permitted to shoot there.
The carefully composed “At the Lathe, ‘Hammer & Sickle’ Factory: Moscow” (1931), shows a kerchiefed young woman, her eyes on her task. It is shot in a way that it bestows dignity on the worker.
‘The Mona Lisa of the 1930s’
It was Lange’s 1936 photograph, “Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California,” that moved a nation as part of the effort to demonstrate the plight of Americans in the grip of the Great Depression.
In it, a mother’s gaze is drawn elsewhere as a baby naps in her lap and two other children, their faces turned from the camera, frame her care-worn face.
The woman was identified decades later as Florence Owens Thompson, whose family trekked to California from Oklahoma in search of work. The image captured the plight of migrant workers like no other and was dubbed “The Mona Lisa of the 1930s.”
And there it is, in the corner of the gallery, in an area marking the New Deal, alongside two other Lange images, “Mexican Field Laborer in Onion Field, Near Tracy, California” (1935), and “Child and Her Mother, Wapato, Yakima Valley, Washington” (1939).
Taking the long view
Chandra wanted to make sure I saw contemporary German photographer Vera Lutter’s “Old Fulton Street, Brooklyn, New York: June 1, 1996,” a massive negative print captured with a large non-mechanical box camera.
It dominates one of the large gallery spaces, an image of the East River, reversed in a long exposure.
“These are monoprints,” Chandra said. “She’ll stay there for 60 minutes or more, capturing different scenes of New York. Thinking about the whole arc of photography, this is how it started, just trying to capture sunlight on a photographic plate. This is how it started, and this is now how she’s working again with that same concept.”
The Hudson River Museum (https://www.hrm.org) is at 511 Warburton Avenue, Yonkers, NY 10701. It is open Wednesdays to Fridays from noon to 5 p.m., and Saturdays and Sundays from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. On Free First Fridays, the museum is open an free of charge on the first Friday of the month, from 5 to 8 p.m. Reach the museum by Metro-North’s Hudson Line to the Yonkers and Glenview stations. Admission is $15, $9 for seniors and students with valid ID, and veterans, $8 for those age 3 to 18, free to those younger than 3 and to museum members.
Will write soon.
What a nice way to redirect your mind for a bit!
Love the ways to get there and hours too