1938. Oil on canvas. Signed and dated by the artist, Leon Bibel. In the 1930s, Leon Bibel enrolled first in the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), and then the mural division of the Works Project Administration (WPA). He soon became one of the most recognizable artists of the New Deal era..... More
Chicago: US/Guatemala Labor Education Project, (c. 1990s). Lithographed poster. Printed in black and red, the image centers on a woman bent over a sewing machine. Above her flies a lushly feathered bird, and beneath her is printed the challenging question, “Was your shirt made by Guatemalan women earning $3 a...... More
Minneapolis, MN: Mnemonic Press, 2011. Two small quarto vols. (82); (82)ff., loose. One of seven copies, signed by the artist, Harriet Bart. Commemorating the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, Drawn in Smoke is both meditative and challenging, with each of its 160 sheets pairing a victim’s name, inscribed in..... More
Chicago: Sherwin Beach Press, 1993. Oblong octavo. 21pp. One of 200 copies. Four photographs by Mike Tappin depict people living on insubstantial government funds, the “safety net.” The text by Steve Bogira, originally published in 1983 in the Chicago Reader, details the lives of those hovering at the poverty line..... More
NY: Equinox Cooperative Press, 1935. Thirty lithographs by Ward illustrate Hicks’ biography of Reed, the author of Ten Days that Shook the World and the first American ambassador to the Soviet Union. Reed witnessed firsthand the Bolshevik Revolution, and through his articles in The Masses, transmitted his impressions to an..... More
Winnetka, IL: Vixen Press, 2002. Caryl Seidenberg’s drawings, reproduced here by polymer plates, depict the simple domestic beauty of sewing materials and, by harsh contrast, semi-abstract visions of the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire. Pinsky’s celebrated poem likewise addresses the injustice of such industrialized and dehumanizing work, beginning..... More
Santa Cruz, CA: Moving Parts Press, (1991). Quarto. (44)pp. One of 70 copies, signed by the author, Francisco X. Alarcón. Forty pen-and-ink drawings by Ray Rice, in his second collaboration with his daughter, Felicia Rice, printer and proprietor of Moving Parts Press, are at once abstract, fractural, and familiar. Literally..... More
(Providence, RI): RISD, 2015. Ten photopolymer plates depict, in a hazy brown palette, gruesome photos of unidentified female bodies found on the outskirts of the border town of Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. The images’ abstractness evokes the frightening yet fascinating intermingling of life and death; the lines are definitive, but the..... More
Matanzas, Cuba: Ediciones Vigía, 2013. Octavo. 59pp. One of 200 copies. Nancy Balboa’s illustrations celebrate Cuba’s agriculture, and draw a parallel between its grassroots rural life and its heritage of grassroots revolution. Martí, considered by many the “patron saint” of Cuba, was at the forefront of such organic, popular activism..... More
(c. 1999). Two posters, one featuring an armed young man beneath the Vietnamese flag watching an American fighter plane crash, and the other depicting Ho Chi Minh amidst the flags for North Vietnam and the Viet Cong. Though reproductions, these posters mark a shift in post-war Vietnam, in which propaganda..... More
NY: Jonathan Cape and Harrison Smith, (1930). First edition, second printing. This is Ward's second woodcut novel, with the story told exclusively via woodcut illustrations. Through this dramatic and expressive non-verbal style, Ward communicated situations and emotions using nothing more than the woodcut's stark contrast of black and white. A...... More
