Art History and the Local

Ralph Fasanella’s painting Dress Shop (fig. 1) attests to the enduring importance of the local. In the center of the composition, Fasanella (1914–1997) peels away the brick façade of the garment factory, allowing viewers to witness a busy shop floor. On the left, workers— most of them women—sit at long tables, poring over black sewing machines. On the right, workers steam, press, and finish the garments that will make their way to market. Thus, Dress Shop offers a glimpse into a scene Fasanella likely considered “local.” Having accompanied his mother, a buttonhole maker, to the New York City dress shop where she worked during his childhood, Fasanella was, by adulthood, intimately familiar with the rhythm and hum of a factory floor.1 Nurtured by his mother’s antifascist and trade-unionist politics, Fasanella would eventually become a radical labor organizer whose fight for the dignity of workers’ lives caused him to be blacklisted during the McCarthy era.2 This familiarity with which he approaches Dress Shop’s subjects subverts its otherwise schematized aesthetic: while his figures might seem generic representations of anonymous workers, Fasanella individuates each figure’s dress and posture—even modeling some after himself and people he knew.3 A yellow sign hanging on the building’s façade, “In Memory of the Triangle Shirt Workers,” reminds the viewer that the lives of workers are both sacred and precious, emphasizing that protected labor is, quite literally, a matter of life and death.4 Thus, the focal center of the painting, the shop floor, illustrates not just sites of production but a community of laborers themselves.