Over the course of his career, Evans created an unvarnished portrait of the United States, photographing people, buildings, and signage, including this poster advertising a minstrel show peeling off a brick wall. Minstrel shows were an exploitative form of popular entertainment throughout the US from the 19th century into the 1950s that reinforced white supremacy by perpetuating painful and negative stereotypes of African Americans. Taken in 1936 during the Great Depression, while Evans was on assignment for the Farm Security Administration, this photograph serves as a record of the long history of violence and oppression facing the country’s Black communities.
2021
Explore more
Walker Evans
American, 1903–1975 368 works onlineIn a review of Walker Evans’s first career retrospective , critic Hilton Kramer noted, “Our experience of an Evans photograph may begin with an admiration for its design and a delight in its subject; it ends, however, with an overwhelming sense of the photographer’s own unmistakable temperament.
Learn more →
From MoMA Design Store
Installation views
We have identified this work in the following photos from our exhibition history.
Licensing
Artwork or archival images
If you would like to reproduce an image of a work of art in MoMA's collection, or an image of a MoMA publication or archival material (including installation views, checklists, and press releases), please contact Art Resource (publication in North America) or Scala Archives (publication in all other geographic locations).
Audio and film clips
MoMA licenses archival audio and select out of copyright film clips from our film collection. At this time, MoMA produced video cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. All requests to license archival audio or out of copyright film clips should be addressed to Scala Archives at [email protected]. Motion picture film stills cannot be licensed by MoMA/Scala. For access to motion picture film stills for research purposes, please contact the Film Study Center at [email protected]. For more information about film loans and our Circulating Film and Video Library, please visit Circulating Film and Video Library.
Text from a publication or the archives
If you would like to reproduce text from a MoMA publication, please email [email protected]. If you would like to publish text from MoMA's archival materials, please fill out this permission form and send to [email protected].
Feedback
This record is a work in progress. If you have additional information or spotted an error, please fill out this feedback form.