Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture

Visualizing Labor in American Sculpture focuses on representations of work in American sculpture, from the decade in which the American Federation of Labor was formed, to the inauguration of the federal works project that subsidized American artists during the Great Depression. Monumental in form and commemorative in function, these sculptural works provide a public record of attitudes toward labor in a transitional moment in the history of relations between labor and management. Melissa Dabakis argues that sculptural imagery of industrial labor shaped attitudes towards work and the role of the worker in modern society. Restoring a group of important monuments to the history of labor, gender studies and American art history, her book focuses on key monuments and small-scale works in which labor was often constituted as ‘manly’ and where the work ethic mediated both production and reception.

• Interdisciplinary interest

1. The work ethic ideology and American art; 2. The Haymarket affair; 3. The world’s Columbian exhibition of 1893; 4. Douglas Tilden’s mechanics fountain; 5. The Constantin Meunier exhibition; 6. American genre sculpture in the progressive era; 7. Capitalism, communism, and the politics of sculpture, 1917 to 1935; 8. The Samuel Gompers Memorial.