Design: Steel
- Date
- 1937
- Material
- Hard-ground etching with aquatint
- made in
- New York, New York, United States, North and Central America
- Classification
- Prints
- Collection
- Prints, Drawings, and Photographs
- Current Location
- Not on view
- Dimensions
- plate: 13 7/8 × 10 13/16 in. (35.2 × 27.4 cm)
sheet: 20 7/8 × 15 7/8 in. (53 × 40.4 cm) - Credit Line
- Gift of the Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration
- Rights
- Public Domain
- Object Number
- 192:1943
NOTES
A steel mill looms menacingly, nearly crowding out the delicate, interwoven gravestones and homes huddled in the background. Blanche Grambs exploited aquatint’s rough, grainy quality to its full potential to make the mill appear dirty and pockmarked. In 1936, while working for the Federal Art Project’s Graphic Arts Division in New York City, she visited Lansford, in northeastern Pennsylvania, whose coal mines fed the steel industry. The prints she made in response are among the strongest statements of solidarity between workers and unionized artists, such as herself.
We regularly update records, which may be incomplete. If you have additional information, please contact us at provenance@slam.org.