Bold mix

The Great Depression is portrayed in history as a time of terrible hunger and desperation. And it was.

But there were also positive outcomes from that difficult decade.

Huge public works projects brought electricity to Appalachia and many other remote areas of the country. Dams and bridges were built. The government decided to insure individuals' bank deposits. Social Security was born.

And in Chicago, two groups of artists -- immigrant Jews whose families had run from pogroms in Russia and eastern Europe and blacks who had moved from the South to avoid lynch mobs, Jim Crow laws and the boll weevil insect which destroyed the cotton crop -- met and cooperated.

For years that association was forgotten or ignored and the individual pieces of art were distributed far and wide to museums and private collectors.

But now, for the first time, they have been tracked down and brought together for an exhibit. The Koehnline Museum of Arts at Oakton Community College in Des Plaines is displaying the art through March 28 in an exhibit titled "Convergence: Jewish and African-American Artists in Depression-era Chicago." The museum, located at 1600 E. Golf Road, Des Plaines, is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Fridays, and from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays.

The exhibit features paintings, sculptures and works on paper focusing on Chicago's urban landscape, the state of a nation facing a depression and the human factor. Some of the later pieces also depict civil and social rights struggles, according to Nathan Harpaz, curator of the Koehnline.

Sixty-six pieces were assembled from seven different museums and a number of private collections for the exhibit, Harpaz said.

It took two years to track down and assemble the exhibit, working like detectives, following various leads, he admitted.

"Many of these pieces have never been shown publicly before because they are owned by relatives of the artists and they were reluctant to part with them, even for a short time," Harpaz said.

So while he expects many requests for the exhibit to travel to other museums after its time at Oakton, Harpaz admitted that it would be difficult to get all of the different sources to agree to such a tour. Consequently, this will probably be the only time the exhibit will be shown in its entirety.

The story of the exhibit began several years ago when the Koehnline was given a portfolio of wood cuts made by 14 Jewish artists in Chicago in 1937, Harpaz explained. The portfolio was made as a fundraising project for Biro-Bidjan, the Jewish autonomous region in the Soviet Union. All of the artists knew each other from working for the Works Progress Administration.

A catalog about that portfolio was published and Richard Courage, a professor of English at the State University of New York's Westchester Community College, came across it while researching a book on the Black Renaissance in Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, Harpaz said.

Courage explained what he had learned during his research about the association between the two ethnic groups and Harpaz became intrigued and before long they were working together to assemble an exhibit.

Courage wrote in the exhibit's official catalog that the two ethnic groups were naturally drawn together because both had endured violence, job and educational discrimination and poor living conditions, yet had rich cultural traditions.

"In most cases the Jewish artists were mentors to the younger, African-American artists at places like Hull House, the South Side Community Art Center, the School of the Art Institute and the Abraham Lincoln Center, a settlement house similar to Hull House," Harpaz explained.

Unfortunately, during The Great Depression, the art market was "virtually non-existent," according to Courage, and artists of all races were starving until "one WPA subsidiary, the Federal Art Project, was authorized to hire impoverished artists -- not only to save them from starvation, but to maintain and develop their highly specialized skills."

"As a result of this bold initiative, thousands of artists - from apprentices to highly accomplished painters, sculptors, illustrators and designers -- became full-time government employees," Courage wrote.

Many of Chicago's Jewish artists were hired, but black artists were almost completely excluded until their Jewish friends organized an Artists Union and staged a sit-down strike at the WPA's office in the Merchandise Mart. As a result of these efforts, more than 20 African-American artists were hired to work on murals and other WPA projects.

"These artists befriended, influenced and worked alongside one another, but they constituted less a school of artistic expression or a unified ideology, than a generational milieu, shaped by a particular set of circumstances," Courage explained.

If you go

What: "Convergence: Jewish and African American Artists in Depression-era Chicago" art exhibit

When: 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Mondays-Fridays and 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturdays, through March 28

Where: Koehnline Museum of Art at Oakton Community College, 1600 E. Golf Road, Des Plaines

Cost: Free

Call: (847) 635-2633 or visit www.oakton.edu/museum to view more pieces