Before Rural Was Red: Prints from the Schmidt Collection

[nosmokes]

I wish there were more easily accessable images, but I think it's an awfully powerful case made by the author and shown so starkly in the art of the difference between an authentic rural experience and the idealised mythical one espoused by corporate images like po'folks chain restaraunts or *all you can eat 'boofeys'at the local Shoneys.Clicking on some links at the page and following thetrail will takke you some more images and discussion of the art if you're so inclined.
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Before Rural Was Red: Prints from the Schmidt Collection

In images of rural life from the first half of the 20th Century, piety goes hand in hand with hardship. A new exhibit shows "religious art" from America's pre-Jet-Ski era.
By Julie Ardery

American regionalist art of the 1930s and 1940s often gets described as "sentimental." But I think "devotional" hits nearer the mark. It's as close as we've ever come to an American religious art.

The rural images of this period, especially, portray lives of saints, nameless ones in brogan shoes. They wear cotton dresses and overalls. Heads bowed, they muscle against the elements. As dutifully as St. Catherine clutched her wheel or Lawrence lay down on a brazier, these rural saints squint into dust storms, toil and drink from rainbarrels. Rural landscapes of this era are scenes of spiritual reckoning, too, the puckered barns and twisted treetrunks as dreadful as Golgotha, just in an American way.

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complete article and images here

[Tandalayo_Scheisskopf]

1. Great Website.

Fantastic.