GALLOWAY – Richard Stockton College is hosting the photography exhibit “Claiming Citizenship: African Americans and New Deal Photography” through Feb. 28 on the first floor of the library, in the E-Wing of the main campus.

Admission to the exhibit, funded by the New Jersey Council for the Humanities and the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, is free.

The exhibit portrays black Americans claiming economic, cultural and recreational opportunities created by the New Deal. Additional display cases highlight how other minorities experienced American life in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

“This exhibit is timely in several respects,” said Sharon Ann Musher, assistant professor of U.S. history, who coordinated the exhibit.

“First, in the midst of the current economic downturn, when Obama has had so little success implementing a federal jobs program, it’s important to re-examine the range of jobs the New Deal created and to see how they jump-started the economy and preserved the skills and the morale of the unemployed.

“It is timely to reassess black civic engagement and opportunities roughly 50 years after the start of the civil rights movement and as we approach the national Martin Luther King holiday and Black History Month,” Musher said. “These photos depict how despite ongoing discrimination and inequality, African Americans took advantage of government programs and policies to work, learn, take care of their families, receive health care and vote.”

Musher was contacted by the traveling exhibit’s curator, Rickie Solinger, after hearing of her own research on New Deal photography for her forthcoming book “A New Deal for Art,” which is to be published by the University of Chicago Press.

The local component of the exhibit included work with six of Musher’s former students, she said.