During the Great Depression, photographers were sent out under the auspices of the Farm Security Administration, in order to take photographs that would drum up support for the program. One of the locations visited by photographers was rural New Mexico, and the photographs that were taken remain a unique snapshot of this era in New Mexican history.

Protest, civil disobedience, war, and the right to a free press are all threads that are woven through the tapestry of United States history. This curriculum uses samples from the New Mexico Museum of Art’s photography collection to tug on those threads through documentary photography.

This guided exploration investigates the links between poetry and visual art, through deep looking and study of information surrounding William Penhallow Henderson’s drawing and Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name: When Lilacs Last in the Door Yard Bloom’d, as well as the historical event that inspired Whitman’s work.