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About the Exhibition
While visiting Waterworks Visual Arts Center in Salisbury NC, I came across a series of pictures of life during 1937 in a small impoverished neighborhood called Bostian Alley. Residents of the “Alley” were photographed by Alex and Margaret Smoot, about whom very little is known.
It is so easy to reduce any group of people to stereotypes, yet the Smoots were able to capture the subjects’ personalities and some of the complexities of their lives, including the joy this community found in music, dance, and family despite their social status and poverty.
Time has not been kind to the photos, which have lost some resolution and clarity. I determined to set about recreating, reinterpreting and reimagining the images with oil paints in an attempt to bring back their original life.
I chose thirty photos from the series for this project. As the photos are black and white, I selected a palette appropriate for the time, then cropped and added my own vision. These photos by Alex and Margaret Smoot tell a story of family, community and perseverance. They obviously felt that it needed to be told, and that these people should not be forgotten.
The paintings, along with the photographs, will be on display at Waterworks Visual Arts Center from September 17, 2024 through August 30, 2025.
In concert with this show, Waterworks Visual Arts Center will exhibit forty works by leading European Modern artists from the personal collection of the late New York philanthropists Julian and Josie Robertson. Spanning over 100 years of art history, the collection includes works by twenty-eight significant artists, including Bonnard, Derain, Gauguin, Kandinsky, Monet, and Picasso.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Maria Bennett Hock is an internationally recognized artist whose paintings have been shown across the United States and Japan. She often spends her time as a copyist at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where she completes in-depth studies of the work of master painters of the past. She is a member of the Coast Guard Art Program, the Portrait Society of America, Oil Painters of America, American Women Artists., and most recently, she was accepted into the prestigious Salmagundi Club, one of the oldest art clubs in the United States. For more information visit www.mariahock.com
1937 Bostian Alley
through the lens of Alex Smoot and Margaret Boylan Smoot
The 1937 Bostian Alley photographs by Alex Smoot and Margaret Boylan Smoot offer historic insight into Rowan County’s past. The photographs selected for the exhibition reflect the people and the way of life of Bostian Alley, a section of downtown Salisbury, which was located on corner of North Main and North Church streets, and West Franklin and West Cemetery streets. It was razed in the late 1940s. A poor area at the best of times, Bostian Alley was immortalized in these photographs taken during the depths of the Great Depression. The overall tone of the images is not the somber one that many great photographs of that era tend to convey. Instead, children are laughing and dancing, young men and women are captured with an air of pride and enthusiasm, and the elderly citizens of the Alley look on with caring and contentment.
Hear the words of Betty Lou Smith, who grew up in Bostian Alley, come alive in an awe-inspiring immersive experience. It is apparent that Bostian Alley was a vibrant and dynamic place in spite of the challenges faced by those who called it home. Viewers of this exhibition will truly get a sense of the community and feel that they were there on those days as the shadows grew longer and the light grew dimmer…
Alex Smoot was a pathologist born in Salisbury who spent most of his years in Greensboro. He and Margaret Boylan met in college and later married (4 July 1949). They were avid photographers and won many photography competitions. Their work is collected widely throughout the region, and has been exhibited in many prestigious venues. Margaret Boylan Smoot died in 1987; Alex Smoot died in 2000.
The 1937 Bostian Alley photographs are a part of the Waterworks Visual Arts Center Education Collection.
Special thanks to:
The words you hear have been adapted from the memoir of Betty Lou Smith by local writer Jenny Hubbard.
Narration by Andell McCoy.
Recorded at the studios of Catawba College School of Music; produced and engineered by Professor Aaron Shay.
Do you have information about Bostian Alley?
If so, we would love to hear from you!
Contact: Anne Scott Clement at director@waterworks.org