This bright watercolor is from Alston's Rosenwald Foundation scholarship period when he traveled through the South between 1940 and 1941. According to Daniel Schulman, Alston's Rosenwald Fellowship project planned "to help do for the South in art what Grant Wood, John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton accomplished for the Middle West." Unfortunately, Alston's Southern plans were cut short by his enlistment into the army in 1942. Alston produced vivid imagery during this Rosenwald period while traveling through the Carolinas, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia. In Durham, NC, he followed Giles Hubert, an inspector of the Farm Security Administration, to many farm sites such as this one, and then ended up in Atlanta. There, Alston found a studio in Atlanta University's library, where he lived with Hale Woodruff. Kenkeleba p. 22; Schulman pp. 90-91.
