Lewis Hine, a real hero of Labor Day

 

Least we forget what Labor Day is really about: Lewis Hine, a real hero of Labor Day 

The dark-haired girl on the right with the impish smile, her name was Eddie Lou, she was about 8 years old when this photo was taken in 1909. The picture was taken at the Tifton Cotton Mill, Tifton, Georgia. The girls worked there.

The photograph was taken by Lewis Hine, who visited factories such as this mill and took photographs of the children who worked there as evidence for the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC). At times, Hines had to disguise himself, even posing as a bible salesman in order to get on company grounds because as a photographer he was prohibited.

"In the early 1900s, Hine traveled across the United States to photograph preteen boys descending into dangerous mines, shoeless 7-year-olds selling newspapers on the street and 4-year-olds toiling on tobacco farms. Though the country had unions to protect laborers at that time — and Labor Day, a federal holiday to honor them — child labor was widespread and widely accepted. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that around the turn of the century, at least 18 percent of children between the ages of 10 and 15 were employed," according to the Washington Post.

Child laborers in glasswork. Indiana, 1908. Library of Congress

Many industries hid the fact that they employed children. They took advantage of poor families, such as Eddie Lou's family. Eddie Lou's father had died and left her mother with 11 children and no income. Her mother was forced to work at the cotton mill for $4.50 a week. Eddie Lou and four siblings also worked there and they were all together paid $4.50 as well. Eddie Lou and her youngest siblings would eventually be sent to an orphanage because her mother wasn't able to provide for them.

Hine had been a teacher, but he left the teaching profession when he realized a camera could be used as an educational tool for social reform. He became a photographer for the NCLC to help change the laws and end child labor.

It was sometimes a dangerous job, and Hine was frequently threatened by factory police and foremen. He visited factories, sweat shops, and other businesses touted as the pillars of the community. He would find the young children, like Eddie Lou, working at these places, toiling their childhood away.

Hine also photographed immigrants at Ellis Island at a time when popular opinion of immigrants wasn't good. According to The Tenement Museum, which preserves and interprets the history of immigration, Hine "sought to humanize immigrants, to make their journeys, their wants, their struggles indistinguishable from any American".

Hines' photographs would be instrumental in changing the child labor laws in the United States. If it were not for him and his photographs, industries would have been able to hide the immorality of child labor and would have been able to continue exploiting children. If it were not for him, children today, instead of enjoying a three day weekend, would probably be working.

Adolescent Girl, a Spinner, in a Carolina Cotton Mill(1908) Princeton University Art Museum

“It was Lewis Hine who made sure that millions of children are not working today,” said Jeffrey Newman, a former president of the New York-based committee."

According to the Washington Post, Though there had been investigations that attempted to expose these circumstances in the past, the industry simply dismissed those reports as — the term they would use today is — ‘fake news,’ ” said Hugh Hindman, a historian of child labor. “When Hine comes along and supplements the investigations with pictures, it creates a set of facts that can’t be denied anymore.”

Hine didn't have to do what he did, yet he did. At the time, he was one of the most hated men in America because of his photographs. He would be threatened with violence and even death. But, he felt it was his moral obligation to do what needed to be done, what some refused to do, what others were not capable of doing. Some inferred that it was unpatriotic to do what he did. Others, however, would realize later that what he did was one of the most patriotic things you can do.

According to the Washington Post, back then "there was no such thing as going viral in the early 1900s. The spread of Hine’s photos and the reform that they inspired was extremely slow. The Fair Labor Standards Act, the federal law that would prohibit most employment of minors, wasn’t passed until 1938. Hine died two years later — long before his work would be recognized for the impact it had."

People would forget about Lewis Hine and the work he did. He died at the age of 66.

But his photographs remain a reminder and a testament to his work, to his dedication to do what was right. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Hine

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Lewis-W-Hine

Remember Anne Frank

 Today is Anne Frank’s 100th birthday - June 12, 1929.

Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character & goodness.' (A.Frank)

From Robert Reich: Anne Frank would be 100 years old today. We owe her, and the millions more who perished, infants to the elderly, to never forget their stories. We must teach future generations about the murderous horrors of the Holocaust and the danger of seeing fellow human beings as "others." Apparently the lesson hasn't been learned or it's been discarded.

We owe her but antisemitism is on the rise and it’s terrifying and disgusting at the same time. In the same city where Anne hid from Nazis during WW2, Jews are attacked in the street, her statue must remain covered so it’s not desecrated, and volunteers at the Secret Annex are prohibited from wearing yarmulkes because it’s too “political.

Zinaida Serebriakova , Russian-French woman painter. Joyful realist

Zinaida Serebriakova , Russian-French woman painter. Joyful realist 

At The dressing table. The painting that led to public recognition. 1909 

Zinaida Serebriakova was born in the Ukraine on December 12, 1884. She was a member of the Benois family, one of the more artistic families of the Russian Empire, descended from a man who fled to Russian during the French revolution and whose descendants became artists, architects, sculptors and even an actor. 

Peasant Woman Sleeping, 1917

She was renowned for her joyful realist style and thrived at a time when female painters were seldom recognized. Serebriakova left an indelible mark on her nation’s culture through masterful paintings of the contemporary life and landscapes of her Russian homeland. 

Her grandfather, Nicholas Benois, was a famous architect, chairman of the Society of Architects and member of the Russian Academy of Science. Her uncle, Alexandre Benois, was a famous painter, founder of the Mir iskusstva art group. Her father, Yevgeny Nikolayevich Lanceray [Wikidata], was a well-known sculptor, and her mother, who was Alexandre Benois' sister, had a talent for drawing. One of Zinaida's brothers, Nikolay Lanceray, was a talented architect, and her other brother, Yevgeny Yevgenyevich Lanceray, had an important place in Russian and Soviet art as a master of monumental painting and graphic art. 

The Russian-English actor and writer Peter Ustinov was also related to her.

Self Portrait 1911

Country Girl

Bleaching Cloth

In 1917, the Russian Revolution destroyed her secure life. Her husband died of typhoid contacted in a Bolshevik jail, her money and her family's estate were confiscated. She was left penniless with four children to raise. 

House of Cards

Anna Akhmatova 1922

Blue Ballerinas, 1922

"She did not want to switch to the futurist style popular in the art of the early Soviet period, nor paint portraits of commissars, but she found some work at the Kharkov Archaeological Museum, where she made pencil drawings of the exhibits. In December 1920 she moved to her grandfather’s apartment in Petrograd. After the October Revolution, inhabitants of private apartments were forced to share them with additional inhabitants, but Serebriakova was lucky - she was quartered with artists from the Moscow Art Theatre. Thus, Serebriakova's work during this period focuses on theatre life. 

Also around this time, Serebriakova's daughter, Tatiana, entered the academy of ballet, and Serebriakova created a series of pastels on the Mariinsky Theater."

In 1924, she was able to leave Russia and move to Paris, having received a commission to paint a large decorative mural. She was able to get her two youngest children out of Russia but did not see her two oldest children until the thaw in Russian politics until Khruschev, 35 years later. 

She was now able to travel , visiting Africa, Morocco, and the Atlas mountains of Morocco. Her love of beauty as well as respect for her subjects shines through all of her paintings.  

Zinaida Serebriakova died in Paris on 19 September 1967, at the age of 82. She is buried in Paris, at the Russian cemetery at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinaida_Serebriakova

https://www.freeart.com/gallery/s/serebriakova/serebriakovabio.html  

Georgia O'Keeffe. Feminist, painter, creator of America modernism.

 

Georgia O'Keeffe. Feminist, painter, creator of America modernism. 

 

 

To look at a Georgia O’Keeffe painting is to see America. Throughout her career, from her first show in 1916 to the late 1970s, the indomitable artist was concerned with what it meant to paint her country – and she became captivated by the wide plains, rocky outcrops and bold blue skies of New Mexico, her adopted home.

O’Keeffe’s first show was at the 291 Gallery in New York, 100 years ago this May 2016– a fact that was celebrated in a major retrospective of her work at Tate Modern in London. Alfred Stieglitz,(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Stieglitz)  who ran the most modern and influential gallery in New York , was shown her charcoal work by a mutual friend in 1916, and, impressed, included it in a group show without asking O’Keeffe’s permission. She wrote to ask him to take it down, he refused; a lively, flirtatious correspondence began.

Alfred Stieglitz took hundreds of pictures of O’Keeffe, who became his wife (Credit: Alfred Stieglitz/The J Paul Getty Trust)

By 1918, he’d tempted O’Keeffe away from a teaching job in Texas, with the offer of a flat financed by him in New York; within a month, he’d left his wife and moved in with her. There followed a creatively fertile period in both their lives, with O’Keeffe painting the city and their summer residence at Lake George in upstate New York, and Stieglitz taking hundreds of pictures of the woman who would become his wife in 1924.

But it wasn’t until their relationship ran into difficulties (due to her boredom with NY Life and their various affairs), and O’Keeffe took off west, that she really found her own distinct vision of the US landscape. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

It’s easy to imagine how inspiring it must have been for the artist. The high altitude and dry climate result in a crystalline light that seems to bring out astonishing colors: the chalky ochre and pepper-red of the rocks and the sun-bleached grey-gold of the prairie grasses flicker against the famous New Mexico skies, whose dark, rich blueness it would be easy to become addicted to. The air crackles with static. Every shadow seems laser-cut.

O’Keeffe first visited northern New Mexico in 1929, staying in the tiny town of Taos with friends. She needed to get away from Stieglitz, who was in the midst of an affair with the heiress Dorothy Norman and following her own numerous affairs. The trip proved a good idea creatively as well as emotionally: O’Keeffe was revitalized by the landscape, and fascinated by the Pueblo culture and architecture of the Native American tribes of the area.

She had found her place. O’Keeffe began to spend her summers alone in New Mexico, renting remote properties and ‘tramping’ around the countryside, taking her paints with her; in 1940 she bought an Adobe house called Ghost Ranch, and in 1945, another in the little village of Abiquiú, 48 miles north of Santa Fe. Stieglitz never visited: New Mexico remained hers alone.

The area around Sante Fe in New Mexico where the artist settled is known as ‘O’Keeffe country’ (Credit: Georgia O'Keeffe House, Abiquiu 5, View from House)

She had also found her own form of Modernism. In the 1920s, living in New York and hanging out with Stieglitz’s masculine art crowd – Paul Strand, John Marin, Arthur Dove, Edward Steichen – she complained that the US lagged behind Europe, because American Modernists failed to engage with their own country. No wonder no-one was writing ‘the Great American Novel’ or painting the ‘Great American Vision’. “I was excited over our country [but] I knew that at that time almost any of those great minds would have been in Europe if it was possible for them,” she commented. “They didn’t even want to live in New York – how was the Great American Thing going to happen?”

O’Keeffe grew up on a farm in Wisconsin, which is “why the landscape is important to her, becomes symbolic for her,” says Tanya Barson, curator of the Tate show. But it was when she went Southwest and discovered New Mexico, that O’Keeffe found her Great American Thing. Like her more famous close-up paintings of flowers, her vision of the Southern skies and mountains wavers between figurative and abstract; she crops in on a view, like a photographer, finding the abstract shapes and simplifying line and form, heightening color until it has an emotive effect. 

Jimson Weed/White Flower No 1 1932 fetched the highest price ever for a work by a female artist in 2014 (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

Showing many landscapes within a chronological survey of her work, the show at the Tate moved from the clichéd perception of O’Keeffe as ‘that famous female artist who painted swirling vagina flowers’. Such a Freudian reading was encouraged by Stieglitz from her earliest exhibitions, and later enthusiastically taken up by 1970s feminist critics – but O’Keeffe “consistently denied” such interpretations throughout her entire career. One could say that this was an example of "see what I tell you, not what is there in front of your eyes." 

Still, her close-up flowers images are beloved the world over. Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics; she’s too easy.

Her smooth painting style and huge popularity has seen O’Keeffe often reduced and sneered at by critics

“Many of her works visually seem very simple; they’re approachable,” acknowledges Cody Hartley, Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Georgia O’Keeffe museum. “They also reproduce very well; they make good posters. The work appeals to a lot of people – it has an accessibility that a Jackson Pollock does not have. But actually to paint that way, so there’s not a lot of evidence of the labour involved, is very difficult. Her technique is amazing – long, continuous, smooth brushstrokes - but it’s hard to appreciate how much work and thought went into her paintings because they don’t make that obvious.”

O’Keeffe painted several pictures at her other home, Ghost Ranch, including My Backyard (Credit: 2016 Georgia O'Keeffe Museum/DACS, London)

Following Stieglitz’s death in 1949, O'Keeffe moved there permanently. She painted the distinctive, indigenous Adobe architecture of the region: low buildings of wide, softly curved walls made of straw and mud, that bake hard into a bright, distinctive red-brown finish. Both her homes were in this style, although she put in huge, plate-glass windows too.

She converted a car into a mobile studio so she could work in the landscape - as well as painting from memory back in her studios. She painted several pictures of the White Place, softly flattening out the jagged fingers of rocks, white-on-blue. Her form of abstraction is about “color and composition” suggests Caroline Kastner, curator of the O’Keeffe Museum: “she’s rejecting perspective… reducing and editing what you’re seeing in the landscape to the flat surface of a painting.”

Some critics say the skull paintings are a comment on the Depression, while for others they simply represent the realities of frontier country (Credit: The Brooklyn Museum)

Her ‘back yard’, meanwhile, looks towards striking cliffs where the different strata of rock - some dating back 200 million years – make a pastel layer-cake of colors, with improbable spires and spindly chimneys of stone jutting up towards the sky. O’Keeffe captured their varied tones, in sweeping landscapes and abstracted close-ups: elephantine mauve lumps, creamy yellow cliffs, braiding slopes of peach and pistachio, red-raw streaked rock-faces.

Her many paintings of these views seem smoothly stylized, exaggerated, too bright – but visiting, you can see how the contrasts do come from the land itself. These views also form a backdrop for her 1930s still lives of skulls and bones, sometimes floating – Surrealist-fashion – in the air; critics have suggested the morbid symbols against the desert landscape symbolize the Dust Bowl and the Depression, while for others they simply represent frontier country, O’Keeffe’s Modernist vision of the American West.

O’Keeffe painted what Barson calls “the chromatic landscape of Ghost Ranch” enough to fill a whole room of the Tate’s exhibition. Usually, she painted a subject – say, horse skulls - for around a decade, then moved on. But there was one image she never grew tired of: the Pedernal mountain. She just kept painting it, with later paintings framing the summit through the holes in sun-bleached pelvis bones.

O’Keeffe felt a profound emotional and artistic attachment to this landscape; after her death in 1986, the Pedernal was where her ashes were scattered. Not long before she died, she deemed the distant, blue-hazed summit her private mountain: “God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_O'Keeffe

https://collections.okeeffemuseum.org/

No Kings Day in Sf

 

NO KINGS in San Francisco

Visibility Event · Volunteer organized

Time

Saturday, October 18

1:30 – 4:30pm PDT

Market Street & Steuart Street

San Francisco, CA 94105

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About this event

In America, we don’t put up with would-be kings.

Join National Nurses United, Indivisible SF, and 50501 SF for No Kings in San Francisco. We will gather at Embarcadero Plaza and Sue Bierman Park at 1:30. March begins at 2 PM sharp. We will march up Market St. to Civic Center Plaza, where we will have a rally at 3:30 PM. Wear halloween costumes, bring flags, signs and musical instruments. Let's make this a peaceful expression of joyful resistance to tyranny!

Our peaceful movement is only getting bigger and stronger. “NO KINGS” is more than just a slogan—it’s the foundation our nation was built upon. Born in the streets, carried by millions in chants and on posters, it echoes from city blocks to rural town squares, uniting people across this country to fight dictatorship together.

The president thinks his rule is absolute. But in America, we don’t have kings, and we won’t back down against chaos, corruption, and cruelty. Grow our movement and join us.

📍 Where: Attendees gather at Sue Bierman Park (near Embarcadero Plaza) for the MARCH. Then we will have a RALLY at Civic Center Plaza

📅 When: 1:30 - 4:30 PM 

A core principle behind all No Kings events is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values and to act lawfully at these events. Weapons of any kind, including those legally permitted, should not be brought to events.

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Accessibility

Accessible restrooms

Mainly flat ground

No stairs or steps

ASL interpretation

Have accessibility questions? Reply to your registration email to confirm your requirements or request more information.

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