Barriers and Disparities: Housing in America, Responses from the UNL Community

Reflections from the University of Nebraska Community

To foster interdisciplinary conversations around works of art and to deepen our understanding of the issues explored in the exhibition Barriers and Disparities: Housing in America, Sheldon Museum of Art invited several members of the University of Nebraska community to each write a brief reflection on or a response to an artwork of their choice, from the perspective of their own interests and areas of expertise. Their texts are included here.

Contents

Charles Henry Alston Deserted House Response by: Adam R. Thompson Assistant Director, Robert J. Kutak Center for the Teaching and Study of Applied Ethics, College of Law Lecturer, Philosophy

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text by Maya Angelou

Responses by: Jeannette Eileen Jones Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies

John Alvin Anderson Modern Indian Home Responses by: Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom Assistant Research Professor, Center for Great Plains Studies Katrina Jagodinsky Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of History Graduate Chair of History

Gregory E. Rutledge Associate Professor of English and Ethnic Studies

Contents

Solomon D. Butcher The Jacob Coover Sod House Response by: Andrew Husa Lecturer, Geography

Wright Morris Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska Response by: Robert Brooke John E. Weaver Professor of English Director, Nebraska Writing Project

John Mackie Falconer Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880 Response by: Ash Eliza Smith Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts

Gordon Parks Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 Response by: Sarah Deyong Associate Professor of Architecture

Contents

Paul Strand Gordon Parks Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956 Response by:

The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three Responses by: Jason Griffiths Associate Professor of Architecture

Charlie Foster Assistant Vice Chancellor for Inclusive

Daniel Tannenbaum

Student Excellence

Assistant Professor of Economics

James VanDerZee Louis B. Sloan Self-Portrait

Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio

Response by: Patrick D. Jones Asociate Professor of History

Response by: Deirdre Cooper Owens The Charles & Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine Director, Humanities in Medicine Program

Charles Henry Alston

Charlotte, NC 1907–New York, NY 1977 Deserted House 1938 Lithograph Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Helen Y. Thomson Art Gallery Fund, U-5510.2008

Back to Contents

Charles Henry Alston Deserted House

The walls of home confine, but they also define—they tell us where one is free to be.

Once free to be one can find a foundation for self-expansion and self-expression—the security to live as one sees fit. Hence, freedom requires a place to be. Eviction, then, is a threat to one’s freedom, and so homelessness a significant reduction of it. Without a place to be, one wonders what they are or can be, that is of course when wandering allows time and energy for such reflection. This deserted home, then, is curious. Was it freely abandoned as one grew to realize that their future lay elsewhere? Was it the site of natural violence—disease or infection pushing life out? Or did its former occupants find their freedom threatened and reduced through forced vacation? The security of home—the need for somewhere to be to be free.

Adam R. Thompson Assistant Director, Robert J. Kutak Center for the Teaching and Study of Applied Ethics, College of Law Lecturer, Philosophy Back to Contents

John Alvin Anderson

Halland, Sweden 1869–Atascadero, CA 1948 Modern Indian Home 1898–1910 Gelatin silver print Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Mid-America Arts Alliance, U-1959.1976

Back to Contents

John Alvin Anderson Modern Indian Home

This photograph suggests how cultures adapt to new technologies. Here a thípi (tipi) and a wood-frame house—as well as a Lakota man and young child—share a plot of land. At first glance, the image may highlight the federal government’s imposition of the reservation system onto Native Americans.

Yet it’s possible that the thípi might have been reserved for ceremonies or used only in the summer, while the Lakota family may have used the “modern” home in the winter months or for cooking. Just as Indigenous Americans incorporated European glass beads into their weaving, they embraced new forms of housing in their daily lives.

Mikal Brotnov Eckstrom Assistant Research Professor, Center for Great Plains Studies

Back to Contents

John Alvin Anderson Modern Indian Home

Taken circa 1898-1910 on the Rosebud Indian

Indigenous people never really abandoned

Reservation in South Dakota, John Alvin

the housing practices they had developed

Anderson’s photograph of a “Modern Indian

over centuries in their Native ecosystems, and

Home” coincides with the efforts of federal

leaders like Winona LaDuke are advocating

Indian agents, politicians, and reformers at

for an integration of traditional and cutting-

the turn of the twentieth century to coerce

edge technologies in twenty-first century

Indigenous people to adopt modern homes

design, such as tipis equipped with solar

like the cabin on the left and abandon

arrays and Tesla charging stations. Tribal

traditional homes like the tipi on the right.

nations throughout the United States are

Photographers like Anderson documented

partnering with non-profit organizations to

this domestic assimilation campaign to portray

build clean energy infrastructure that foster

the supposed successes of federal Indian policy and contributed to a form of salvage ethnography along the way, documenting what anthropologists and artists assumed to be a vanishing way of life among Indigenous people.

energy independence and promote tribal sovereignty and values. It may very well be that over the next century more of us consider the environmental and economic impact of overconsumption and overbuilding, concluding that Indigenous housing technologies are a

What is ironic about Anderson’s title, Modern

modern solution to the increasingly alarming

Indian Home, is that many twenty-first century

problems of homelessness and climate

builders are reconsidering the aesthetic

change.

and ecological advantages of Indigenous technology, including their architectural practices, and are now trying to incorporate

Katrina Jagodinsky

Indigenous design and materials into their

Susan J. Rosowski Associate Professor of

own projects and marketing them as avant-

History

garde and innovative. At the same time,

Graduate Chair of History

Back to Contents

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Gastonia, NC 1924–Houston, TX 2001

Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text

by Maya Angelou 1994 Lithograph Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Anna R. and Frank M. Hall Charitable Trust, H-3069.5.1997

Back to Contents

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text

by Maya Angelou

My eyes immediately focus on the central

heritage of the enslaved who gaze at the

figure, a Black woman who appears to be

majestic Black sun and its corona—a gloriole

resting on a washboard after finishing the

perhaps, representing the radiance of a saint.

laundry. While she has completed her chores,

The rays of the sun meld into the roofs of the

she carries two uprooted homes on her

houses. It is a picture of hope. The travails

head, balancing them as if she was in Africa

of “Our Grandmothers”—Black women who

carrying water to her home. Eight kerchiefed

toiled day and night for white slaveholders—

figures (four men and four women) flank the

will one day end and our mothers and fathers

houses, as they face the radiant Black sun.

“shall not be moved.”

The houses, upon closer inspection, are two larger figures embracing. They too look towards the sun, their bodies made of the very shingles, arches, and corners of the house. All ten figures stand on a boardwalk, perhaps the one on which they disembarked from the slave

Jeannette Eileen Jones Associate Professor of History and Ethnic Studies

ship onto American shores. The lithograph evokes both the space of the slave quarters, the transatlantic slave trade, and the African

Back to Contents

John Anansa Thomas Biggers Untitled from the Our Grandmothers book with text

by Maya Angelou

Why, officially, “Untitled?” Probably for the

African head-covering, a queen’s crown, a

same reasons that many are unhoused:

musical platform for her housed children

The more glorious you are, the more titles

and children’s children? Far above them the

you bear, the grander your houses. And the

drinking gourd, for star-gazing to freedom

opposite. John Anansa Thomas Biggers takes

and the future, a soulful space where five not-

the logical historical consequence (slavery/

angels (read: “flying Africans”)—the dreams of

racism unhouses people) to explore the very

husband and wife making seven—take flight?

meaning of, and the cultural remnants in,

The checkered wholeness that crowns it all,

house. “House,” an ancient word with Indo-

this pyramid, from slave-quarter shadows into

European roots (meaning “to cover”), likely

dark, infinite possibilities?

has far older macro-linguistic roots in our human family some 15,000 years old. Hence Biggers’ Subject: TAKE I slave-quarters, TAKE II a checkered-kerchief as offensive stereotype, and let time do its thing…ACTION! Can you

“Untitled” and unhoused, but Biggers traces the ancient majesty of people’s souls. When we see these souls, homelessness will itself become unhoused.

see the time Biggers wove into the image, its meaning a hidden web, the soul of its essence?

(Grand) Mother Africa, a broad-shouldered

Gregory E. Rutledge

sturdy house, and unhousing slave quarters

Associate Professor of English and Ethnic

with interiors receding into infinitude? Native-

Studies

Back to Contents

Solomon D. Butcher

Burton, WV 1856–Greeley, CO 1927 The Jacob Coover Sod House 1887 Gelatin silver prints Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of the Nebraska State Historical Society, U-2374

Back to Contents

Solomon D. Butcher The Jacob Coover Sod House

The Jacob Coover Sod House portrait, like so

families captured in an image by Butcher that

many of portraits by Solomon D. Butcher, gives

were happy to show off the results of their

the viewer a glimpse into the resettlement

hard work and resilience as they built their

of the American Great Plains by Anglo-

homes from the ground (literally) up. This is

Americans, African Americans, and European

just one of the thousands of photographs by

immigrants during the homesteading era,

Butcher that documents the homesteading

which began in 1862. The sod house, or

experience and American resettlement of the

soddy, depicted in this portrait is one of over

region.

1,000 sod houses that were photographed by Butcher. With few to no trees in the American Great Plains at this time, settlers built their homes using strips of the topsoil, which they laid like bricks.

Andrew Husa Lecturer, Geography

Sitting out front in their Sunday best, Jacob Coover and his family are one of the many

Back to Contents

John Mackie Falconer

Edinburgh, Scotland 1820–New York, NY 1903 Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880 Etching Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, University Collection, U-423.5.1963

Back to Contents

John Mackie Falconer Negro Huts, Near Wilmington, N.C. from the American Etchings portfolio 1880

This etching connects directly to my current

practices. In 2008, hundreds of acres of

immersive storytelling collaboration,

oceanfront property that once made up the

Seabreeze Bop City, that is based outside of

Seabreeze beach community were bought out

Wilmington in Seabreeze, North Carolina, a

from under families in a partition sale with very

Jim Crow-era beach community where Black

little compensation for them.

people owned the land and all the businesses.

Seabreeze was an incubator of African American music and culture throughout the first half of the 20th century.

I’m working with Land Rich, a North Carolinabased non-profit, and the School of Architecture, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona, to link the history of Seabreeze

Seabreeze is an example of a kind of Black

and the land, using storytelling and design

land loss that is endemic throughout the

to raise broad public awareness while

Southeastern United States. Like many

providing an evidentiary tool that families can

historic Black-owned family properties, the

use to communicate their ancestral lands’

land was primarily passed down through the

significance during the heirs’ property legal

generations informally, instead of through

process.

wills or other legally documented transferals of ownership. Much of the land today in Seabreeze is heirs’ property, and, as such,

Ash Eliza Smith

it is vulnerable to predatory development

Assistant Professor of Emerging Media Arts

Back to Contents

Wright Morris

Central City, NE 1910–Mill Valley, CA 1998 Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska 1947 Gelatin silver print, printed 1978/80 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Josephine Morris through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-5100.2000

Back to Contents

Wright Morris Upstairs Bedroom from The Home Place, near Norfolk, Nebraska

In our work with teachers, students, and

place. Wright Morris is Nebraska’s only two-

writers through the Nebraska Writing Project,

time National Book Award winner (for Field

we raise local issues that provide purpose

of Vision, 1957, and Plainsong (For Female

and meaning to young people’s writing.

Voices), 1981)—a hidden gem in our plains

Housing, and the home places we dwell in,

literary and artistic landscape

is one such local issue. Across the Great Plains, homesteads are being abandoned due to the outmigration of young adults, leaving communities depleted. Equally challenging is access to quality living spaces for those seeking to move into plains communities.

Robert Brooke John E. Weaver Professor of English Director, Nebraska Writing Project

In a series of iconic photos taken during the 1940s, Wright Morris sought to capture “what’s just about to vanish” in rural America.

The poignancy of an aging farmhouse in Upstairs Bedroom is part of that effort. His photo/writing book The Home Place, in which this image appears, reflects on these issues through the story of an adult son with children returning for a visit to his parents’ Nebraska

Back to Contents

Gordon Parks

Fort Scott, KS 1912–New York, NY 2006 Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956 1956 Pigment print, printed 2013 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-6471.2015

Back to Contents

Gordon Parks Outside Looking In, Mobile, Alabama, 1956

The focus of this photograph, squarely visible

discriminatory lending practices, and race-

in the near middle-ground, is no ordinary

based dispossessions of property in the name

chain-link fence. It is a barrier that segregates,

of gentrification are but a few of these well-

that excludes much more than it includes. In

documented practices.

the foreground and background, we can infer, very clearly, the photo’s real subject matter: systemic racial and economic injustice. The celebrated photographer, Gordon Parks, took this picture as part of a photo-essay for Life

Sarah Deyong Associate Professor of Architecture

magazine on Jim Crow America. Parks places the viewer on the side of the fence with the children, so we may identify with those who have been excluded. Sixty-five years later, the image remains poignant. Since the Jim Crow era, discriminatory practices against Black lives continue even after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in pervasive and insidious ways. Segregation,

Back to Contents

Gordon Parks

Fort Scott, KS 1912–New York, NY 2006 Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956 1956 Pigment print, printed 2013 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Robert E. Schweser and Fern Beardsley Schweser Acquisition Fund, through the University of Nebraska Foundation, U-6472.2015

Back to Contents

Gordon Parks Willie Causey and Family, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956

I have to say that this image touched me immediately. The young woman looking out on what is her life with eyes that say she is dreaming of something…something else. This speaks to me because I am from Alabama. I grew up in the eighties, so my images were different. My wardrobe choices included discount jeans and t-shirts from Sears. But my step-grandmother lived in a shotgun house that was on the property of the slave owner, who had owned the patriarch of her family. I remember reading books that transported me far from her front porch. I remember dreaming of living a life like the people I read about. I remember that look. I feel her heart beating fast. I am like her.

Charlie Foster Assistant Vice Chancellor for Inclusive Student Excellence Back to Contents

Louis B. Sloan

Philadelphia, PA 1932–Philadelphia, PA 2008

Self-Portrait 1956 Oil on canvas Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Olga N. Sheldon Acquisition Trust, U-5539.2009

Back to Contents

Louis B. Sloan Self-Portrait

Nineteen fifty-six. As a historian of the civil

His trim and tidy figure stands firm, but not

rights movement, that date is what is initially

stiff, eyes level, confident and knowing, his

most striking to me about this stunning self-

carriage conveying a quiet strength and

portrait by under-appreciated Philadelphia

controlled confidence against a backdrop not

artist, Louis Sloan. Nineteen fifty-six was

of sad, dilapidated slum housing—another

a tumultuous and transitional year for the

common trope of the era—but of clean

struggle for racial justice. Just two years

architectural lines, clear geometric shapes,

on from the monumental Brown decision.

and softly lit, even lovely, hues. This depiction

One from the slaughter of Emmett Till. The

of blackness, though more subtle, is no less

Montgomery Bus Boycott, which had started

assertive, or proud, than the raised fists of the

in December of 1955, was still in progress,

Black Power era, or the signs held by striking

unsettled. And in response to the prospect

Memphis sanitation workers in 1968, which

of transformational racial change, thousands

read, “I am a man.” And while there are no

of white southerners had unleashed a brutal

bald political gestures, Sloan’s self-portrait

counter-movement that came to be known as

conveys a similar sense of self-worth and

“massive resistance.” In our popular memory

human value that is not up for question or

of African American experience during this

contest, but merely self-evident, transcending

period, the images that dominate tend to

the conditions and expectations of white

capture the inequality and degradation of

supremacy.

segregation, the initial stirrings of the freedom movement, or the recalcitrance of southern white racists. But here, Sloan is unconcerned with such momentous events, asserting instead a more subtle kind of racial dignity.

Patrick D. Jones Asociate Professor of History

Back to Contents

Paul Strand

New York, NY 1890–Orgeval, France 1976

The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three 1916 Gelatin silver print, printed 1980 Sheldon Museum of Art, University of Nebraska–Lincoln, gift of Michael E. Hoffman, U-4055.1.1987

Back to Contents

Paul Strand The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three

“On the Fence” For many people the garden fence describes hominess. It defines the exact line of decorum and good neighborliness. Homeowners set up a fence to mark the threshold of what they own.

Many homeowners are not indifferent to the fence either. They are not on the fence about fences. For many people fences do not divide

Perhaps people who have a home but no fence are not indifferent to the fence either.

To them the fence may be offensive too, but in a different way. They may also not be on the fence about the fence.

Amid all the confusion of the fence—of offense, difference, dividing lines, divisiveness and division—perhaps it is simply better just to stay on the fence.

but unite. To describe this dividing line as divisive is, perhaps, offensive.

But while the fence physically marks the

Jason Griffiths Associate Professor of Architecture

extent of a property it also visibly frames the home as an architectural image. A home with a fence becomes an icon of hominess to be appreciated from the street. In this sense, physically owning a home may also extend to owning the idea of home as well.

But compared to this ideal image of home, are all other homes less homey? If your home is an apartment, a trailer, a camper or a collection of belongings by the street, is this any less a home?

Back to Contents

Paul Strand The White Fence, Port Kent, New York from Paul Strand: Portfolio Three

For many Americans, the house is a symbol of upward mobility. It is a means for acquiring wealth, an investment in one’s children. It represents the private sphere, safety from the elements, and from the intrusion of unwelcome guests. But the house also has a deeper and more uncomfortable resonance in American history, as an instrument of exclusion, and a means for enforcing discriminatory government policies, such as redlining and school segregation, which excluded African Americans from the benefits of homeownership and public schools. Fencing, as a visual theme, represents both the separation of private and public spaces, and the boundaries that maintain social separation and caste, which have limited access to the American dream.

Daniel Tannenbaum Assistant Professor of Economics

Back to Contents

James VanDerZee

Lenox, MA 1886–Washington, DC 1983 Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio 1915 Gelatin silver print, published 1974 Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska Art Association, purchased with the aid of funds from the National Endowment for the Arts, N-423.5.1976

Back to Contents

James VanDerZee Miss Suzie Porter, Harlem from the James VanDerZee: Eighteen Photographs portfolio

This photograph seems to represent an

in a country that denied them this option.

oppositional view of urban African Americans

Despite the great societal barriers most

compared to mainstream images and ideas of

African Americans faced in terms of locating

African Americans as not only rural dwellers

safe and secure housing in the United States,

but also poor people. James VanDerZee

here we see a Black woman surrounded by

was the preeminent black photographer of

the accoutrements of wealth in a beautiful

Harlem’s Black elite and Suzie Porter’s striking

home. Miss Porter’s opulent image stands

image encapsulates the glamour of Harlem’s

in direct contrast to what most Americans

glitterati. Porter is in a setting that shows the

believed about Black people and it stands as a

influence of the Victorian era, from her attire

testament to the diversity of Black Americans.

to her home’s décor (even her plant sits atop a lace covering). Miss Porter, and it is important to note that VanDerZee calls her “Miss” because Black women were not typically afforded this form of respect outside of their communities. Thus, it is striking to note that VanDerZee intentionally positioned a Black

Deirdre Cooper Owens The Charles & Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine Director, Humanities in Medicine Program

woman as representative of genteel ladyhood

Back to Contents