Train Station - Ellison

Train station by walter ellison

Walter Ellison lived from 1899–1977.

About the Time Period

• The Great Migration brought millions of African Americans from the rural South to Northern cities between 1910 and 1970. Ellison’s painting Train Station was inspired by this historic event.

• In the South, African Americans were subject to Jim Crow Laws that enforced racial segregation and discrimination. They had very limited access to good jobs. They moved to northern cities, such as Chicago, in search of work and a better life.

• When Ellison’s painting was made, the Great Depression, a period of wide- spread unemployment and hardship, was occurring in the United States. A government program, the Works Progress Administration / Federal Arts Program (WPA/FAP), was established to support artists during the Great Depression. Ellison worked as an artist in the WPA/FAP.

Information below quoted and paraphrased from the Art Institute of Chicago:

Walter Ellison's Train Station (1936) depicts white and black travelers departing from a central terminal, bound for different cities. The composition reflects the social values of the time, which prevented members of the two races from mixing. On the left, white passengers board trains for vacations in the South, while on the right, African American passengers head for trains going to northern cities where they hoped to find better jobs and living conditions. The station depicted here may be the very place here Ellison, in 1920, boarded a train heading north, joining the more than six million African American s that also left their rural southern homes after World War I . Ellison traveled to Chicago, the nation's industrial center, where migrants could find potential jobs in meat packing and rail and steel mills. Although discrimination was inescapable, the city offered acceptable schools, voting rights, and leisure activities. Once in Chicago, Ellison studied at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Artist Walter Ellison's Train Station shows the social patterns of the time period and suggests the urgency of the black travelers to get on with the new life of the North.

Walter Ellison's Train Station is one of the cleverest, smartest paintings in the Institute. There are three vanishing points that create a "W," which is the first initial in Walter Ellison's name. Walter Ellison is part of the Great Migration. He came from Georgia and managed to document that experience in that very small painting. On the left, you see southbound trains and you also see well-dressed whites being escorted onto the trains by porters who are dressed in orange, and they are going to vacation spots in the South. On the right, you see northbound trains—Chicago, Detoit, New York—and you see African-American passengers boarding the train, and one of the things we should notice is that they aren't being helped by the porters. At least, not visibly. In fact, it was the porters who carried the news of the North to the South. They were the ones responsible for revealing opportunities and jobs; the riches to be had in the North. But also the respect of holding a job and not having to bow to southern whites;n trains represented freedom. That why for escaping slaves, the Underground Railroad was used as a metaphor—the railroads, the passage to freedom. During the Great Migration, trains came to concretize, or to make real, this idea of the train as escape, as a vehicle—literally—for liberation.

The best resource for this piece is the Resource Packet from the Art Institute of Chicago, which is attached at the bottom of this page and can be clicked and downloaded for your use.

questions:

• The white passengers in this painting are headed south toward Miami for vacations. How are they dressed? Where is Miami? (Show students on map) Why do you think Miami is a popular vacation spot?
• The African American passengers are headed north in search of more freedom and better paying jobs. How are they dressed? How is this different from the white passengers? How do you think each set of passengers is feeling about their journey?
• What kinds of jobs you think were available in Chicago for the African American passengers? Are these jobs still needed today? Do you think that they paid well?
• What colors do you see? Look for the suitcase in which the artist painted his initials- W.W.E (front right side). Why do you think he painted them?
• What do you think the trains and the train station symbolize? The can symbolize movement, the future, and the hope for prosperity. On the other hand it could stand for displacement, dispossession, and loss. How do you think Ellison was feeling when he boarded his train?
• Do you see the one point perspective in this picture? Ellison used one point perspective to make the halls on the right and left seem to extend very far into the distance. Even though the center hall stops at a wall, you can see that if the lines formed by the edges of the hall were extended, they would eventually cross at the horizon line. What other tricks has Ellison used? (People and columns are bigger in the foreground and smaller in the background; colors in the foreground are brighter and warmer while colors in the background are duller and cooler; people and columns overlap with things behind them.) The sharply exaggerated perspective creates a space that appears physically inaccessible, perhaps symbolizing remote destinations and unimaginable conditions at the end of the journey.

activities:

Bring in a CD of jazz to play in the background during the presentation.

Have students draw something in the distance and include details. Or draw a picture from one-point perspective.

Ask the students to create and then discuss a picture that represents a trip they have taken or ask them to create a postcard with a drawing on one side and a description on the back. Where did they go? What did they pack? Who did they travel with? What did they do when they got there?

Describe the suitcases or bags the travelers in Train Station are carrying. What would you guess was in each of them? Ask the students to create their own suitcase. Using shoeboxes or other containers, or paper template, have students decorate their suitcase according to where they want to go. Ask them to write the words or draw pictures of items that they would like to take with them on their trip and place them inside the suitcase.

resources/Links: