Art Metropole

#10959

Stainless (set of four prints)

Artist

Etienne Turpin

Date

2013

Publisher

Etienne Turpin

Format

Multiples

Size

66 × 66 × 0.1 cm

Description

This print series by artist Etienne Turpin is titled Stainless. Each print offers a reading of the history of the struggle in a graphic narrative that overlays urban maps, historical images and figures, contemporary photography and other layered imagery to produce a complex but aesthetically charged image of labor and its history in North America. Each of the plates has a ‘clipped’ corner, suggestive that the overall image of all four prints tells one story, connecting the deep time of the Sudbury mines to defining moments of labor struggle in Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

List of prints:

Prehistory | On the Sudbury Basin and Cosmic Contingency

This print suggests the etymological and mineralogical meanings of the term ‘astrobleme,’ and onsiders how these definitions accord with the social and environmental consequences of ‘exoskeletal mineralization’ – a practice more commonly known in the Sudbury Basin as mining.

May 4, 1886 | Chicago’s Haymarket Riot

This print questions the role of memorialization of labor history by examining the signs of its erasure in Chicago following the implementation of the 1909 Burnham Plan for the city commissioned by the Commercial Club following, indirectly, the events of May, 1886, and subsequent struggles for workers rights, especially the eight hour work day.

July 6, 1892 | Pittsburgh’s Homestead Strike

In this print we see Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, whose plot to assassinate Henry Clay Frick, the junior industrialist whom Andrew Carnegie charged with breaking the resolve of the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers union, followed Frick’s arming hundreds of strike-breaking Pinkerton agents with Winchester rifles, his sole intention that of destroying, at all cost, the union in Homestead, Pennsylvania.

March 7, 1932 | Detroit’s Ford Hunger March

This print tells the story of the commission issued by Edsel Ford and William Valentiner, Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, for Diego Rivera to paint the Detroit Industrial Murals and follows the massacre, ordered by Henry Ford, of laid off autoworkers who marched on the Rouge River plant in Dearborn, Michigan, demanding compensation for their lack of employment.

1.