From xxxxxx <moderator@xxxxxx.ORG>
Subject Remembering Ralph Fasanella
Date December 18, 2022 1:00 AM
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[ UE Organizer and Painter of Working-Class Life and Struggle]
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REMEMBERING RALPH FASANELLA  
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Jonathan Kissam
December 16, 2022
United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America
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_ UE Organizer and Painter of Working-Class Life and Struggle _

Sunday Afternoon by Ralph Fasanella, Estate of Ralph Fasanella.

 

Ralph Fasanella, the former UE organizer who became recognized as one
of America’s greatest painters of working-class life and struggle,
passed away twenty-five years ago, on December 16, 1997. His paintings
— which he intended to be viewed in union halls, not private homes
— depict a working class that is diverse, politically engaged yet
exuberant in their leisure, and, most importantly, organized and
willing to engage in struggle.

His large canvases of urban and workplace scenes are filled with
people, each one lovingly rendered as an individual, yet tied together
into a collective through Fasanella’s use of vibrant color, cutaway
views and creative perspective. The figures looking out of the windows
of the tall apartment blocks that form the backdrop of many of these
paintings are not lonely, alienated individuals, but people fully
engaged in the life of their city.

In _Sunday Afternoon_, from 1953, Fasanella depicts a street baseball
game. The contrast of the chalked diamond against the black asphalt
establishes the central story of the painting: neighborhood kids have
claimed this space for play. Adults watch from the sidewalks and
apartment windows above; couples stroll down the sidewalk; in the
lower left-hand corner a group of men gather to chat. The human
figures tower over the cars and trucks parked along the street; there
are no angry motorists honking at the kids to get out of the way. As
in all of Fasanella’s sports paintings, there isn’t a clear
distinction between players and spectators — all are part of a
whole, even those not directly watching the game.

[Ralph Fasanella painting Bench Workers—Morey Machine Shop]
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_Bench Workers—Morey Machine Shop_
He also painted smaller groups of people — families gathered for
supper, or small groups of workers. _Bench Workers—Morey Machine
Shop_, from 1954, shows four workers, including Fasanella (on the
right), who worked at Morey (a UE shop) in the late 1930s and then
again in the early 50s. The workers are unhurried and confident in
their skill. In the words of Paul S. D’Ambrosio, who wrote the text
for a Labor Arts online exhibit of Fasanella’s wor
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Fasanella’s “ideal of a humane and productive work environment:
the goal of a stable union shop.”

[Ralph Fasanella painting Shop Organizing Committee]
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_Shop Organizing Committee_
A theme Fasanella returned to repeatedly in his work was the shop
organizing committee. While not as dramatic as the marches, strikes or
picket lines he also painted, a well-organized committee of workers is
perhaps the single most important means for achieving that ideal of a
stable union shop. Undoubtedly drawn from his time on UE staff, when
he organized the Western Electric plant in Manhattan, Sperry
Gyroscope, and numerous other electrical equipment and machine plants
in and around New York, one of his _Shop Organizing Committee_
paintings shows UE organizing and educational materials on the wall
— “Know Your Union: UE,” a copy of the UE NEWS, a poster
describing the UE steward system, and a wall chart for tracking
progress in signing up members.

[Ralph Fasanella painting Dress Shop]
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_Dress Shop_
Fasanella’s paintings are infused with his deep familiarity with the
rhythms of working-class life. “I loved these people,” he said of
his 1972 painting _Dress Shop_, which depicts workers in a garment
factory like the one his mother worked in, and to which he was brought
as a small child. “They were a part of me. I think the painting
shows a feeling for people, how they live, what they do. That’s what
the painting is all about. Those people, I know them all.”

“I had to paint”

He was born on Labor Day, 1914, to working-class Italian immigrants in
the Bronx. His father operated an ice truck, delivering blocks of ice
in the days before electric refrigeration, and his mother worked in a
garment factory, sewing buttonholes. His mother was also an active
antifascist, and in 1938 Fasanella joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
a group of volunteers who fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil
War.

Returning to New York City, Fasanella became a member of UE Local 1227
when he got a job as a machinist at the Morey Machine Shop in
Brooklyn. He came on UE staff in 1940.

Originally taking up sketching as a form of therapy for the arthritis
he suffered in his hands, Fasanella found painting to be his true
calling. Asked by the UE NEWS in 1972 why he left the union’s staff
in 1946, he said simply, “I had to paint. I couldn’t do both.”
(Fasanella did briefly return to the UE staff in 1950 to help repel
raids from other unions.)

Fasanella’s uncompromising political ideas (and, perhaps, his
association with UE) led to him being blacklisted by many galleries
during the red-baiting of the Cold War. He exhibited his work at union
halls of progressive unions like the Distributive Workers Union, Local
65
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and even got a mention in _Sports Illustrated_
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for his baseball paintings, but was unable to support himself with his
painting. As the UE NEWS reported in 1972, Fasanella was
“[b]lacklisted and hounded as many militant organizers and working
people were during the late forties and fifties”; he “went from
shop to shop and finally ended up pumping gas at a Bronx garage in
order to keep food on the table and a roof over his family’s
head.”

“A ​​theme which has been ignored by American painters”

In that year, Fasanella’s work was discovered by the “art
world.” He was featured on the cover of _New York_ magazine, which
declared “This man pumps gas in the Bronx for a living. He may also
be the best primitive painter since Grandma Moses.” (The label
“primitive” — which Fasanella rejected — was the term used at
the time to refer to artists who had not had formal training, many of
whom were from the working class, women, or people of color. Now the
term “outsider art” is more commonly used.)

The UE NEWS reported
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that a showing of Fasanella’s work at the Automation House Art
Gallery in the fall of 1972, following the _New York_ article, drew
“the sort of crowds that an exhibit of the works of an established,
world-famous artist might attract.”

The centerfold UE NEWS article explained that “[p]eople from all
walks of life — working people, intellectuals, art connoisseurs,
school children, black and white, rich and poor — were flocking to
see this exhibit. … Readers [of the _New York_ article] could see
from the reproductions in the magazine that Fasanella was an artist
with something to say and said it in terms they could understand, but
which are never trite. …

“Viewing sixty of these canvases, one gets the impact of
Fasanella’s life work. He has done what he set out to do, paint the
heroism of the working class in the organizing struggles of the
thirties and forties and the continuing struggles, the jobs and the
sorrows and the hopes that make up the lives of workers and their
families. ... [H]ere, for the first time, is a body of work by an
important artist that deals with a theme, which, with very few
exceptions, has been ignored by American painters.”

[Ralph Fasanella painting Lawrence 1912—The Bread and Roses Strike]
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​_Lawrence 1912—The Bread and Roses Strike_
Following his “discovery,” at age 58, Fasanella was finally able
to paint full-time. One way that he took advantage of this new freedom
was to travel to the mill town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, where more
than 20,000 immigrant textile workers launched the famous “Bread and
Roses” strike in 1912. Staying in modest quarters at the local YMCA,
Fasanella walked the city, talking to residents and sketching its
brick mill buildings. He eventually completed eighteen paintings
which, Anne Broyles wrote in _Merrimack Valley_ magazine in 2017
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a historical record as much as a reimagining of what life in Lawrence
might have been like for the community.”

His paintings of the strike are perhaps Fasanella’s most famous. As
Broyles writes,

According to Jim Beauchesne, visitor services supervisor at Lawrence
Heritage State Park, the city’s “official story” considered the
strike “a shameful episode in history, with outside agitators
stirring up immigrant workers.” Workers were not yet protected by
the 1935 National Labor Relations Act, and the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW) were viewed, Beauchesne says, as “beyond the pale of
American society” when they protested the wage cuts that caused the
workers to strike.

Just ten years later, in 1987, the city would host an exhibit of
Fasanella’s paintings to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the
strike, and one of his strike paintings hangs on permanent exhibition
in the state park’s visitor center.

“Against the exploitation of people and places”

Fasanella’s son Marc recalls growing up in “a very activist
household,” where he had “a really great relationship” with his
father. Fasanella’s wife, Eva Lazorek, was involved in many social
causes including the United Farm Workers grape boycott; Marc recalls
UFW leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta in his family’s living
room.

“Every holiday I had growing up was a political discussion,” Marc
told the UE NEWS, and regular visitors to the house included UE
International Representative Joseph Dermody and former UE District 11
President Ernie DeMaio, who worked at the United Nations following his
retirement in 1974. The younger Fasanella praised the way his parents
and their comrades connected struggles for workers rights, peace and
civil rights: “They had this universal notion that we’re against
the exploitation of people and places.”

He said that his father felt “disoriented” by the rightward shift
of the country in the 1980s. Nonetheless, Fasanella remained connected
to current labor struggles, such as in his 1993 painting _The Daily
News Strike_
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which commemorates the five-month strike against the New York _Daily
News_ in 1990-91, one of the most prominent labor struggles of the
early 90s.

An Ongoing Legacy of Art for Social Justice

In 1986, UE Organizer Ron Carver launched Public Domain, an initiative
to purchase Fasanella’s paintings from private collectors and hang
them in public places. After his departure from UE’s staff in 1988,
Carver spent two years working full-time on the project, supporting
himself with consulting work. Public Domain was successful in placing
a dozen Fasanella paintings in public locations in several states.
Most prominently, a group of 15 unions purchased one of the Lawrence
strike paintings, _Lawrence 1912: The Great Strike_, and donated it to
Congress, where it hung for years in the hearing room of the House
Subcommittee on Labor and Education. (In 1994, after the Republican
takeover of Congress, they removed the painting. It now hangs at the
Labor Museum and Learning Center in Flint, Michigan.)

“When I painted these things, I thought they would be hanging in
union halls,” said Fasanella, commenting on the project in 1990.
“That’s why I made them so big — four, five, six feet. I never
really painted for individuals.”

Public Domain eventually found an institutional home at Michigan State
University, which hosts the website fasanella.org
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Fasanella’s legacy lives on, not only in his artworks, but in the
inspiration his work has given to others. Since his death in 1997,
Fasanella’s son Marc has been managing the artist’s estate, and
working to make sure new generations have access to his father’s art
and vision of using art for social justice. He is currently working
with Michigan State University to develop the _Ralph Fasanella: Art of
Social Justice Project_, and with Florida Atlantic University to
develop a Fasanella Fellowship in Italian-American Studies. And in
2023, author Anne Broyles [[link removed]] will be
publish a children’s picture book, _I'm Gonna Paint: Ralph
Fasanella, Artist of the People​_.

_All images courtesy of th__e estate of Ralph Fasanella. The American
Folk Art Museum in New York City hosts __a large collection of
Fasanella’s paintings_
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of Fasanella’s paintings can be purchased from __museums.co_
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paintings from __Hill Gallery_
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paintings will also be featured at the Outsider Art Fair in March in
New York City._

 

Jonathan Kissam has been UE's Communications Director and editor of
the UE NEWS since August 2017. Prior to that he was a rank-and-file
member of UE Local 203 in Burlington, VT. From 2002-2004 he served on
UE's General Executive Board as the secretary-treasurer of what was
then UE District Two.

* United Electrical Workers (UE)
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* Ralph Fasanella
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* Working class art
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