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UNION IMAGES 2000
Fifty-Five Artists Explore
Human Labor

September 2 - October 15, 2000
Mon-Wed: 10 AM-7 PM;
Thurs: 10 AM-9 PM;
Fri: 10 AM-6 PM;
Sat: 10 AM-5 PM;
Sun: 11 AM - 5 PM.
Admission Free.

Chicago Cultural Center
78 East Washington Street
Chicago, Illinois 60602
Telephone: 312/ 744-6630
http://www.cityofchicago.org/Tour/CulturalCenter/

PART II

"UNION IMAGES 2000: Fifty-Five Artists Explore Human Labor," showing at the Chicago Cultural Center from September 2 through October 15, 2000, is well-worth a visit -- both for the fine work of fifty-five artists, mostly from Chicago, and for the exhibition's theme. It was organized by the Chicago Federation of Labor, the central AFL-CIO labor council for Cook County, and is co-presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs.

The art of "Union Images 2000" treats not only those who work, but their tools. For those who work at what they love to do, rather than labor to survive, the tools of their trade take on an added significance. Such instruments are respected, loved, even taken as objects of art. Standard 2000 by Steven Carrelli iconographically renders a carpenter's plumb bob in egg tempura, a technique he studied in Florence, Italy, as a Fulbright Grant recipient. Standard 2000 is terse, but the artist's admiration for the simplicity and clean line of this tool is evident and eloquent. Crafted object and the artist's mediation as painted image coalesce here. Carrelli himself best explains the piece:

The Perfect vertical of a plumbline is a severe judge that demands perfection. Like an ancient Hebrew prophet, the plumbline makes errors visible while demonstrating their corrections.

Carrelli received his BFA from Wheaton College (1990) and an MFA in painting from Northwestern University (1995).

In Judy A. Langston's Untitled (Gelatin silver print: 16"x20"), a black plumber's hands reverently cradle a wrench and oil cloth. This photograph sets for contemplation the strength and skill of hand, a pride in one's expertise, and a contrast with the linear geometries of the well-cared-for tool. Langston's Untitled evokes an elevation, not of bread, but of the means by which many breads are earned. Similarly, Ray Canty's tempura on crinkled paper ground, Chicago Tribune Break (21"x27"), treats three ladders perched (image right) against the Gothic Revival facade (image left) of the Chicago Tribune Building. The ladders rest, their users on break and absent, and the image juxtaposes the utilitarian design of the ladders against the ornate pseudo-Gothic architecture's ornamentation and lines, but there may well be an overtone of origins: whether construction or repair, the former tools or their like played midwife to the enduring monument. Tools, like workers, leave a legacy.

At least one artist in "Union Images 2000" has explicitly chosen to celebrate labor as a legacy. Michael Thompson has on exhibit in this showing Union Stamps -- Commemoratives (Color laser print: 16"x20" sheet). Thompson's work is well-crafted, colorful and reveals a cleverness of conception with sincere and honest intent.

The poet W.H. Auden, in his Forewords and Afterwords (Vintage: 1973), made the distinction between work (a chosen livelihood), and labor (performed out of necessity, to put food on the table). In the latter case, men and women have risked their lives, often for minimal compensation. The artists of "Union Images 2000" also give testimony to that darker legacy, and to the organizing -- the union movement -- which arose against injustice and uncalled-for risks.

New York artist Miriam Romais has spent much time in the Brazilian states of Pernambuco and Paraiba. Her black and white photograph, Young Man Surveying Gears, focuses on the stark contrast of a fifteen-year old boy precariously balanced within a massive, grinding cliff of machinery. Taken in a Brazilian sugar refinery, the image seems an icon of the Machine Age, worthy of Dante's Inferno, and yet a vision still very much with us. Young Man Surveying Gears is a reminder that in much of the world today, the only limit to labor is the ability to be put to work. Romais's photograph arouses both a sense of heroic necessity about the boy, and a great uneasiness, if not indignation, as to his circumstance. It is art that captures with power a human condition: the need to work in order to live, the threat to life that work must often entail.

Ruthann Godollei's "Detached" (Monoprint: 13"x16") reveals what the artist admits is black humor, tragic irony; but underlying it is the very sober awareness of work as risk, as danger. That this monoprint is executed in black and white both evades graphic shock effect, and renders it amenable to a thoughtful reading of its content. "Detached" is polemic -- art focused on the meaning contained within it; and it is provoking, rightly and effectively so. Godollei is an Associate Professor and the Dean of Fine Arts at Macalester College, St. Paul, Minnesota.

Whatsoever rights with which the Creator may have endowed Mankind, those working have often had to fight to have their rights recognized. In the past, companies often retained a private soldiery, with no holds or restraints on brutal means -- often, with orders to resort to extreme violence, without deference to age or sex. Workers paid in blood, and often lives. Both a fighting organizer and later a legend, Joe Hill traveled the country at the turn of the last century, organizing workers for the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, or "Wobblies"). It is claimed Hill was framed on a murder charge: it is history that he was executed by firing squad on that charge, November 19, 1915. Song-writer Earl Robinson, and lyricist Alfred Hayes composed the song that helped confirm him as a lasting symbol of the spirit embodied in Hill's final words: "Don't waste time mourning. Organize."

And standing there as big as life
And smiling with his eyes
Joes says, "What they forgot to kill
Went on to organize.
Went on to organize."

Strike! (Oil on canvas: 36"x48") by Kathleen Farrell pays tribute to those workers who died in the 1886 quarry worker strike in Will County, Illinois. In this piece, three fellow workers gather about a slain striker, while a woman, perhaps the wife, leans in towards the body. It is an anecdotal work of realism. It echoes to the Pieta, and a long tradition of religious pose, gesture, and typology. It is nonetheless a moving painting. That may be due to its meaning and a viewer's commitments, but here, if it arouses the uncommitted to empathy, that is a potential function of art.

The struggle of labor to organize is filled with violence, danger, and martyrs. It had to be. It also had heros, men and women. Women have played a vital role in unions, as workers as well as allies. Sandra Reibscheid's oil on linen, Womens' Emergency Brigade -- Flint Auto (32"x48"), represents the Strike of 1939 which led to the formation of the United Auto Workers. The women, forewarned that tear gas might be used to end the mens' occupation of the factory, armed themselves with wooden staves. When the tear gas came, they broke out the windows to air the building. Reibscheid's painting is a controlled Impressionism with a somber, defiant content. It should not be missed during a visit to "Union Images 2000."

One admits that such artworks bear an importance beyond aesthetics or philosophies. They keep alive and stand witness to vital human aspirations and needs. They forge bonds and develop latent societal powers. I can personally testify. In the early 90s, when Polish shipyard workers went on strike, American Unions such as the AFL-CIO, against opposition by the State Department and Western governments, set up funds and sent aid. Workers in other countries joined in solidarity. And a superpower spanning 14 time zones, and controlling dozens of other nations... collapsed. We shall not forget. Labor, united, has power.

I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Alive as you and me.
Says I, "But Joe, you're ten years dead."
"I never died," says he.
"I never died," says he.

It hasn't died. That spirit, I mean. Willie L. Carter's rendering in China marker pencil (18"24") is entitled Jobs Now and displays both the indignant anger of a street picket as well as a sense of mutual support among the picketers. Carter studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago. Critic Robert Dilworth stated that Carter portrayed "bruises endured by the urban downtrodden." For a while the artist seemed to drift from direct social commentary, but the later attention to formal artistic considerations has served to intensify Carter's thematic concerns. In Jobs Now, the orator at left is balanced by six more picketers at right. In its artwork, "Union Images 2000" offers much, not so strictly in an art of politics, as an art of spirit. All three artists mentioned above are exemplars of that art.

The art of "Union Images 2000" underscores that not even now, not even here, are all doing well. I'm Happy Cleaning Windows (Woodcut: 11"x14") by Gary Thomas seems a bit ambiguous, and perhaps it is meant to seem so. It is a well-executed wood cut, but whether its title conveys irony, or means to celebrate the Hobo (and anarchist) anthem of the 20s, "Hallelujah, I'm a Bum," is open to the viewer. What is not uncertain is Jennifer L. Richmond's portrayal of the consequences of no work, American Dreamer (Color pencil: 11"x14"). The irony of Richmond's title for this image of a sleeping 'bag lady' is not lost on any viewer.

In "Union Images 2000" work as a chosen livelihood, and as a goal for independence is represented by such images as Samuel Gillis's Businessman (Oil on canvas: 30"x40"). In Businessman, at left, hangs the eternal master of the workday, a wall clock, its hands at 4:05 PM. Below it stands a table computer, another ubiquitous symbol of our age. At image right sits the entrepreneur. It is a frequent goal among those who labor for others to start their own independent, small business. In its composition, Gillis's painting draws on much late Renaissance convention: one thinks of Holbein's portraits of the merchants, notables, and scholars, posed among the objects and emblems of their profession.

In this exhibition, there are works which epitomize the universality of work. Bob Gadomski's City That Works (Acrylic on canvas: 27"x38"), in composition, is a muralistic exposition which mosaicizes vignettes and image elements of labor into a portrait of Chicago in the aspect of one of its long-honored epithets. Gadomski, now a resident of Homewood, Illinois, grew up near the stockyards on Chicago's South Side, and later studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and at Western Illinois University. He has traveled the U.S., Canada and Europe; and worked in bars, factories and stores, as well as a commercial artist, designer, lecturer and sculptor. His work often reveals humor, and in his meticulously delineated detail, toys with a viewer's perception of perspective and scale of visual elements.

Diana Berek's Mandala For Who We Are (Acrylic, pen and india ink: 14"x15") incorporates a Lakota circle as a central focus, ringed about by four human faces in profile in what the artist describes as a prayer and healing mandala. The theme of this well-balanced, graphic composition is unity: The central Lakota design is ringed by stylized figures holding hands, while the four heads, one for each corner of the globe, ring around the periphery to form an unbroken cycle as each head, mouth opened as if speaking, generates its successor. With each opened mouth, a generation is endowed with accompanying attributes of our being: at upper right, earth, grapes and corn; at upper left, the cogs and wheels of work; at lower left, the atoms and computer of science and technology; and at lower right, the tools of the arts. To work is to bring into being. And Berek interprets the creative act as an act of communication.

The artists of "Union Images 2000" are: Nancy Parkinson Albrecht, Beverly d'Albert, Jose A. Bedolla, Diana Berek, Daniel Botkin, Virginia Brettingen, Yaro V. Brozek, Julie Wendt Brundage, Ray Canty, Steven Carrelli, Willie L. Carter, Mae Connor, Joe Crookes, Diana Cutrone, Anne Cypcar, Robert Drea, Beverly Ellstrand, Tor Faegre, Kathleen Farrell, Bob Gadomski, Samuel Gillis, Ruthann Godollei, Susan Gofstein, Robert Heezen, John Heinz, Piotr Hofman, Sarah Hoskins, Linda Hutchinson, Layne Jackson, Adu Jahmal Lahori, Judy A. Langston, Margaret Lanterman, Richard Laurent, John Leben, Carol Luc, Nicole Aimee Macaluso, Charlie Maler, Michael Miller, Walker Moskow, Pat Olson, Valerie Pawlak, Gary Pierson, Nancy Plotkin, Judy Prisoc, Sandra Reibscheid, Jennifer Richmond, Miriam Romais, James S. Rousonelos, Jack Sinclair, Denise Steinberg, Gary Thomas, Michael Thompson, Adriana Villagomez, Rachel Weaver, Patsy Welch.

"Union Images 2000" includes paintings, prints, photographs, watercolors and mixed media, as well as computer-generated art. Michael K. Paxton jurored the fifty-five works from nearly 200 submitted by artists from Illinois and nationwide. The display was curated by Elena Marcheschi, arts and labor attorney of the Chicago Center for Arts Policy at Columbia College. Marcheschi is also a member of the Illinois Arts Council. "Union Images 2000" runs from September 2 through October 15, 2000 at the Chicago Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street, Chicago. A number of related lectures and a poetry reading are scheduled during the exhibition. Full information is available from the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs: Telephone: 312/ 744-6630. An exhibition poster is on sale at the Chicago Cultural Center's store. http://www.cityofchicago.org/Tour/CulturalCenter/

Chicago artist, and juror for "Union Images 2000," Michael K. Paxton, will himself be exhibiting at the Chicago Cultural Center from September 16 through November 12, in an installation of mural-sized canvases centering on rural Appalachia: "Michael Paxton: From Enoch to Strange Creek." In addition, Paxton's "Practical Beings: New Drawings & Paintings" (reviwed on this site, click here) will be at Byron Roche Gallery, 750 North Franklin Street, Suite 105, Chicago, 60610 (312/ 654-0144) from September 8 through October 11, 2000.

Finis PART II
Go To PART I

--G. Jurek Polanski

Jurek Polanski has previously written and art edited for Strong Coffee in Chicago. He's also well known and respected among the Chicago museums and galleries. Jurek is currently a Visual Arts Correspondent for ArtScope.net.

Editorial Note: Many of the books cited in www.artscope.net reviews are in print and may be purchased through this site's Barnes & Noble link. Of particular merit is Songs of Work and Protest, compiled by Edith Fowke and Joe Glazer (Dover: 1973), originally issued in 1960 by the Labor Education Division of Roosevelt University in Chicago. Beverly Ellstrand was recently anthologized in Chicago Art Scene (Crow Woods Press: 1999), which offers an artist's statement and biography. In addition: Michael Thompson has been reviewed earlier in www.artscope.net (vide: "Textbook of Insanity" May 2000).