New exhibit depicts ‘Trouble and Resilience in the American South’

The theme ties in the southeast Missouri Sharecroppers Protest of 1939.

COLUMBIA, MO—The State Historical Society of Missouri, in collaboration with the Missouri School of Journalism, invites the public to view a new exhibit, Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Trouble and Resilience in the American South, open now through Nov. 5 in Columbia. The free exhibition is sponsored by the National Endowment of the Humanities and curated by Berkley Hudson, an associate professor emeritus of the University of Missouri. Seventy-five of the exhibition’s photos are on display in the State Historical Society’s Art Gallery, while another 25 images can be viewed at the Reynolds Journalism Institute on the MU campus. 

The complex issues of race and class in small town America that the Pruitt exhibition explores are intimately tied to Missouri’s history.

A public open house reception with the curators for the exhibition is set for Thursday, Aug. 25, 4-6:30 p.m., at the State Historical Society of Missouri, Center for Missouri Studies, 605 Elm St., Columbia. In addition, Hudson will be signing his recent book O. N. Pruitt’s Possum Town: Photographing Trouble and Resilience in the American South, available at the Society’s Richard Bookstore. 

The main exhibition focuses on photographs produced during the lengthy career of photographer Otis N. Pruitt, who spent his professional life in the small, segregated town of Columbus, Mississippi. Hudson and several of his childhood friends, who grew up in Columbus, acquired the collection. In recent years, with the help from journalism school students and faculty, Hudson has researched some 88,000 negatives that Pruitt made from the 1920s through the 1950s.   “We realized this was the history of our part of the American South, in visual form,” said Hudson. “The photos depict a range of stories from joy, sorrow and suffering to hopefulness and resilience.” 

To tie Mr. Pruitt’s Possum Town to Missouri’s history, the State Historical Society has mounted a related exhibition of artworks from its own collections, Picturing Missouri Sharecroppers: Finding Counterparts to Pruitt’s Images in Missouri.   This smaller exhibit presents images of rural southeast Missouri produced by St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial cartoonist Daniel Fitzpatrick and photojournalist Arthur Witman. On assignment, they documented the Sharecropper’s Protest of 1939 as well as life in the community of Cropperville, a rural Missouri cooperative created to provide homes and farmland to former tenant farmers who participated in the protest.  

LISTEN HERE: The Mo’ Curious podcast explores the legacy of the 1939 sharecroppers strike.

“The complex issues of race and class in small town America that the Pruitt exhibition explores are intimately tied to Missouri’s history,” said Joan Stack, art curator for the State Historical Society.  “Both exhibitions reflect the social and racial inequality rural Americans have faced in the 20th century, as well as the resilience of people who have persevered and challenged the status quo.”   The public is invited to visit the exhibitions during regular visitor hours at the SHSMO Art Gallery from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Saturdays. Learn more at SHSMO.org.