Leah Modigliani: How Long Can We Tolerate This?

How long can we tolerate this? An incomplete record from 1933–1999 (2016) is an assemblage comprising facsimile press photographs of evictions from twelve states. The Philadelphia-based artist Leah Modigliani bounds this survey by focusing on the years between the enactment and effective repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act. Designed to disentangle commercial and investment banking, this act was signed into law by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in March 1933. For the artist’s purposes, this legislation symbolizes New Deal efforts to protect the public by keeping the forces of capitalism in check. Modigliani selects one photograph from each year when the law was in effect and reproduces both the recto and verso. As she notes, the installation reads as both skyline and timeline, functioning as “a historical archive and a representation of working and middle-class material displacement.”

Depression-era riots and rent strikes were expressions of community solidarity in an age when there were significantly fewer evictions than there are today. The issue is now more urgent than ever, with the affordable housing crisis escalating and new pressures being applied by short-term rental companies. In the analysis of sociologist Matthew Desmond, eviction is “a cause, not just a condition, of poverty,” with cascading and corrosive effects not unlike those of incarceration. This year’s arts and humanities theme is devoted to the study of “origins,” and Leah Modigliani invites us to reflect not only on the fragility of “home” but also on the roots of structural disempowerment.

Credit: Exhibition overview from museum website.