Even if you’ve moved beyond the pilgrim and Indian Kumbaya mythology surrounding Thanksgiving, even if the last turkey you made was traced around your fingers, there’s no denying the holiday’s hallowed place in Americana—and our collective sensory memory.
Here, to whet your appetite, a selection of Thanksgiving imagery from the MIA collection. (The turkey photo above, by the way, was taken by Harry K. Shigeta, a modernist art and commercial photographer prominent in the 1940s.)
This Rockwellian Thanksgiving scene was captured in 1940 by Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano at the home of Timothy Levy Crouch, a Quaker, in Connecticut.
Giovanni Segantini’s “The Pumpkin Harvest,” from 1897, captures rural life in the midst of the Industrial Revolution—pastoral life interrupted. The image is on view in Gallery G279.
Designer William H. Bradley’s 1895 Art Nouveau illustration of Thanksgiving, on view in Gallery G379, is from a series of chapbook posters. If only dinner was served like this.
Minnesota photographer Tom Arndt’s view of Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in 1980 captured the context: recession-weary New Yorkers and tourists happy for a distraction.