Art

...It is variety, not repetition, that The itinerary for District 1199's Images of Labor exhibit has not been completed, but so far the following locations and dates are established: During the rest of this year, Images of Labor will be at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, p.C...

...But at the same time we also see a world in which closeness does not crush individuality...

...By contrast, her central figure, a muscular black worker in overalls and a T-shirt fills the middle of her painting...

...4), In 1982, the exhibit will travel to the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (Jan...

...2-31...

...It does not, like the figurative and narrative painting that is so much a part of the current New York art scene, draw its strength from the breakdown of meaning...

...Just the opposite...

...For 1199, which in recent years has sponsored everything from photographic exhibits to a hospital musical review, Images of Labor is another coup...

...In his depiction of New York street life, Fasanella makes no bones about how crowded and cramped it is...

...5-Oct...

...In a period when figurative and narrative painting is making a comeback, it is tempting to argue that the show promises a return to a time when artists felt easy about work that embodied their political loyalties...

...30-Feb...

...What will the final impact of Images of Labor be...

...From the graffiti-splattered subway cars that arch over his cityscape to the apartment interiors that dominate his middle ground, we see a primitive artist's rendering of a world in which space and privacy are at a minimum...

...20) and at the Monongalia Arts Center, Morgantown, West Virginia (Sept...

...the Blandeo Memorial Art Gallery, Fort Dodge, Iowa (Aug...

...Art IMAGES OF LABOR DECIPHERING SOCIAL DISORDER TWO years AGO, through its Bread and Roses cultural program, District 1199, the National Union of Hospital and Health Care Employees, produced one of the most important art exhibits of the seventies, The Working American...

...14-Sept, 12...

...People may be crowded on people, possessions may compete for attention like cans in a supermarket, but in Fasanella's brightly colored world, the result is a sharing of space in which equity and uniqueness are aesthetically and, by extension, politically in harmony...

...There is no minimzinmg the confrontation about to take place-indeed, the word STRIKE is slashed in red across the bottom of Coe's painting-but what we focus on is the worker's view of himself, the psychological changes that have enlarged him and promise to be permanent as long he retains the perspective the strike has given him...

...the Robert I. Kahn Gallery, Houston, Texas (March 20-April 18...

...He is bigger than any of the machines around him, and as he stands with his arms folded, what is revealed is how self-contained he has become...

...Confrontation: Here the most compelling picture in Images of Labor is Sue Coe's rendering of the 1936 Akron rubber-workers' sit-down strike...

...The truth of the matter is, however, that Images of Labor is moving as much against the aesthetic as against the political grain of the eighties...

...Collectivity: On this subject it is Ralph Fasanella's portrayal of a working-class neighborhood in New York City that breaks through stereotypes most successfully...

...For 1199 and the museums which showed The Working American in its nation-wide tour, the exhibit was a breakthrough...

...NICOLAUS MILLSNICOLAUS MILLS...

...The great pitfall of such a show-a literalism that might have turned it into mere illustration-has not occurred...

...Her Perkins, who wears a hat and string of pearls, is every inch the proper reformer, and what we are made to see is that for Perkins, whose huge dark eyes and slightly puffy, downcast face reflect the suffering she describes, propriety is a weapon...

...Organized by Nina Felshin and Abigail Gerdts, Images of Labor opened in April at 1199 headquarters in New York and is just now embarking on a nation-wide tour under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service...

...But in Images of Labor Alice Neel takes on this subject directly with her portrait of Frances Perkins, Franklin Roosevelt's secretary of labor...

...Reform: Even for the WPA artists of the New Deal, this was a subject that it was almost impossible to personify...

...and in the 1960s any artist taking on such a subject would have run the risk of being thought the worst kind of "liberal...

...and the Arnot Art Museum, Elmira, New York (Oct...

...The show brought together two centuries of paintings on work in America and by its sheer scope dramatized how reluctant we have been in this country to acknowledge the relationship between art and labor...

...What the scope of Images of Labor amounts to in practice becomes even clearer when we look at the show thematically and see the way it focuses on three subjects vital to labor and extraordinarily difficult to treat without lapsing into cliche...

...In Coe's picture the rubber-factory bosses are diminutive figures in a glass office in the upper left-hand corner of her painting...

...the Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock, Arkansas (May 8-June 6...

...Although the art of Images of Labor is predominantly figurative, it ranges from the feminist iconography of Judy Chicago's abstract of the Triangle Waist factory fire, to the expressionism of a Jacob Lawrence ur-banscape, to the surreal portraiture of Brad Holland's depiction of Martin Luther King Jr.'s analysis of "the labor hater and the labor baiter...

...The quotation on which Neel's portrait is based comes from Perkins's description of brutal factory conditions, but what is significant is that Neel does not offer us a proletarian or saintly version of Frances Perkins...

...and now 1199 has come up with an innovative successor: Images of Labor, a show of thirty-two newlycommissioned paintings, each based on a quotation about working life in America...

...The Working American did not, however, content itself with self-righteous generalizations...

...It rests on the belief that the social disorder around us can be deciphered- and, beyond that, resisted...

...the Art Center, College of Design, Pasadena, California (June 26-July 25...

...July 16-Aug...

...The working-class dreariness of a painting such as Philip Evergood's Through the Mill is totally missing in Fasanella's street scene...

...She knows that in the world she must operate in sympathy is not enough, and so she insists on holding on to a tension that for all its terribleness allows her to change the lives of working people...

...For Coe, who once worked in a factory, it is a worker's perspective that controls the structure of her painting, and what she captures is the sense of selfhood that comes when the rubber workers she portrays realize they have the power to stop the machines they tend...

...Given the subject, Coe might well have done a perfect thirties' picture from thev point of view of the eighties, but instead she offers something much subtler, a picture that goes beyond the built-in drama of labor violence to capture the inner life of the sit-down strike...

...characterizes his urban vision, and what follows is a view of working-class life in which proximity creates an aesthetic of its own...

...It went on to address a series of political contradictions that American painting makes evident: in particular, between our vision of equality and the reality of class, between commitment to progress and our history of labor warfare, between our rural ideals and our exploitation of immigrant labor...