Black Migrants of California Project

Joel Pickford curated and printed this exhibition of photographs taken by Ernest Lowe from 1960-1964. The show premiered at the Fresno Art Museum and traveled to UC Merced. Many of the children Lowe photographed in the early 1960s attended the opening reception. Lowe's work documents black migrants who fled the Jim Crow south in the 1940s to 1960s, only to be stranded in unincorporated Central Valley camps without running water after their labor was replaced by machines.