Paintings by Alexandre Hogue

The dust storms of the 1930s moved millions of tons of topsoil across America’s heartland, wiping out farms and ranches that had stood for generations. Hogue was a young Missouri-born artist just making his reputation when the Depression and Dust Bowl ravaged the communities of the Southern Plains. He saw firsthand the mass exodus of families who packed what the banks had not taken and set out for California, hoping to find a better future.

Alexandre Hogue’s deep concern for environmental issues was a catalyst for the creation of a body of works that spanned the entirety of his career. The land-management failures that spawned the devastation of the dust-bowl decade of the 1930s became the impetus for some of the artist’s most powerful imagery—the Erosion series. Works such as the DMA’s own Drouth-Stricken Area served as an alarm to the public and an accusation and rebuke to powers that, through encouraging poor farming practices, had helped to produce the greatest agricultural disaster in American history.